No. But, “flourishing for all” shares utilitarianism’s concern for real-world consequences and human well-being. However, it rejects one of utilitarianism’s defining moves: combining welfare across people and making the best overall result morally decisive.
In classical utilitarianism, morality looks too much like a balance sheet. The goal is to maximize overall welfare across everyone affected. That sounds fair at first—everyone counts. But John Rawls famously pointed to a serious problem: this approach can fail to respect the “distinctness of persons.” If only the total matters, severe burdens placed on a few can be justified when enough benefits flow to everyone else.
The suffering and benefit belong to each person, and that matters.
TST treats the phrase “for all” differently. First,
for all means no affected person simply disappears from the moral field.
heir agency, interests, dignity, autonomy, and potential for flourishing continue to matter. Second,
for all does not mean adding everyone’s individual “flourishing score” into one maximized number.
That could too easily turn individuals into expendable pieces of a larger calculation. Mill’s own “no harm principle” helps fix this problem. In TST, morality is not reduced to net welfare — principles such as individual rights, fairness, personal autonomy, proportionality, duties, and moral agency retain their own constraining roles within the system. Outcomes matter, but they are not the only thing that matters.
There is a useful critical-thinking lesson here: similarity is not identity. Two ethical frameworks can both care deeply about consequences and universal human well-being while operating very differently. Utilitarianism seeks the best overall welfare outcome. TST keeps every affected person inside the moral picture and asks how we can move toward flourishing for all without simply sacrificing individuals to the total.
