One of John Watkins's many notable contributions to philosophy is his paper "Negative Utilitarianism", which is the second part of a symposium of that title, the other symposiast being H.B. Action.¹ Both symposiasts consider and reject a form of utilitarianism that had been extracted by my brother Ninian Smart from some remarks in Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies.² However the interpretative principle of charity should prevent us from interpreting Popper as a negative utilitarian in my brother's sense: as my brother indeed remarks, if Popper did have the negative utilitarian principle as a fundamental axiom of his ethics, he also had at least two other principles as well. Certainly if Popper had been a negative utilitarian at all he would have been a singularly muddle headed one.