Contemporary Utilitarianism
The ordinalist revolution that affected economic science from Pareto to the 1930s watershed has totally modified the definition of utility in economics: in order to secure economics’ status as a science, it was necessary to exclude the hedonist interpretation of utility and favour the preference interpretation; this move was completed by the revealed preference theory.
A similar evolution occurred in the utilitarian philosophical literature, especially in the second part of the twentieth century. Both in economics and in philosophy, the model of utility as a measure of pleasure has now been replaced by the preference model (on the comparison of the two models, see, for example, Haslett 1990). Preference utilitarianism also corresponds to a preference view of welfare: if you prefer x to y, it also follows you are better off in x than in y.