Preference Utilitarianism Theory Analysis

Singer's theory of preference utilitarianism rests on the idea that everyone's preferences should be looked at equally. This means that all living and sentient beings have interests, can feel pain and pleasure. Preferences, in this case, does not mean happiness necessarily. Looking at happiness specifically, is another type of utilitarianism that will be discussed further in the later part of this essay. Singer includes people with severe disabilities, animals, intelligent aliens, and infants to the list of beings that need to be considered. To use preference utilitarianism to make ethical decisions, would require us to look at and weigh the preferences of all of these beings involved in the situation, not just our own personal interests. However,

Preference utilitarianism is the better option because it is a much clearer and much simpler. On reason hedonistic utilitarianism is not practical, is that happiness is very vague and hard to measure because everyone's definition of happiness is different. As psychologist, Daniel Gilbert wrote, "happiness is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers use to indicate whatever we please. The problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess (White, 2014)." Happiness is also not very good way of comparing in the types of ethical situations we find ourselves in everyday life. For example, when my mom asks me to clean something up, I feel stressed and unhappy. However, my mom also feels stressed and unhappy. How do we establish who is unhappier? We could put a number on our unhappiness, but even that same level of unhappiness would be given a different between different people. For example, a medical study was performed at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, that showed multiple patients responded very differently to the same level of physical pain (Science Daily, 2013). In this study, 17 patients each had a 120-degree heat simulator placed on their legs. Patients all gave varying numerical (0-10) values to their pain, even though the actual source of pain was identical (Science Daily, 2013). This study shows that everyone experiences pain differently, and, therefore, experiences happiness and pleasure differently. Hedonistic utilitarianism also requires, in certain circumstances, that we choose to make decisions that make us happier in the long run. This can be a very complicated task, and makes deciding which actions to take in everyday life, much harder. In using the theory of preference utilitarianism, making decisions is much simpler. One does