Referring to the at least double origins of utilitarianism in Jeremy Bentham and in neoclassical economics, this intervention explores the ambiguities of the concept of utility in three steps. First, utility can be comprehensively understood as everything that a person can enjoy, or it can be opposed to a concept such as “passion” to underline supposedly positive features such as stability and predictability. Second, utility can be viewed from the angle of an individual person or from the angle of a collectivity, but any step from the former to the latter requires additional assumptions. Third, collective utility has been conceptualized as achievable in two very different ways, either as the aggregate of numerous individual actions or as the outcome of purposeful social action.