For example eating lots of unhealthy food it makes us happy but it could harm our body. In fact utilitarianism, a person performs the acts that benefit the most people, regardless of personal feelings. Rule utilitarianism, however, takes into account the law and is concerned with fairness. A rule utilitarian seeks to benefit the most people but through the fairest and most just means available. Therefore, added benefits of rule utilitarianism are that it values justice and includes beneficence at the same time.
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory founded by Jeremy Bentham. It attempts to justify moral rules and principles and holds that the best moral action is one that maximizes utility. John Stuart Mill refined and wrote a book on this theory, in 1863. ‘What Utilitarianism is’ is the second chapter of the book, ‘Utilitarianism’. Below is the summary and critical evaluation of his writing.
For the reason that Utilitarianism only considers one normative factor, the maximisation of overall happiness, and because it considers all pleasure/happiness to have value, it often conflicts with our common-sense morality and permits great individual deviation from social norms. It is in this way that Utilitarianism allows for injustice, immoral actions and the violation of human rights. I shall provide an example that demonstrates instances where Utilitarianism can be counterintuitive and furthermore give us the morally wrong answer as to which act we ought to perform. The example involves a surgeon who is faced with the decision of killing one healthy patient, harvesting their organs and transplanting them into five patients who are dying in order to save their lives or doing nothing and allowing the five sick patients to die. Utilitarianism maintains that the surgeon do the act that produces the maximum overall amount of utility, namely, the surgeon must kill the one healthy patient to save the five others.
For the reason that Utilitarianism only considers one normative factor, the maximisation of overall happiness, and because it considers all pleasure/happiness to have value, it often conflicts with our common-sense morality and allows for great individual deviation from social norms. It is in this way that Utilitarianism allows for injustice, immoral actions and the violation of human rights. I shall provide an example that demonstrates that in some instances Utilitarianism can be counterintuitive and furthermore give us the morally wrong answer as to which act we ought to perform. The first example involves a surgeon who is faced with the decision of killing one healthy patient, harvesting their organs and transplanting them into five patients who are dying in order to save their lives or doing nothing and allowing the five sick patients to die. Utilitarianism maintains that the surgeon do the act that produces the maximum overall amount of utility, namely, the surgeon must kill the one healthy patient to save the five others.
Mills explains Utilitarianism as achieving life’s goals, it is what everyone wants or seek for. He further explains that utilitarianism promotes the quality of life. Furthermore, utilitarianism is connected to happiness, because we all seek to achieve different goals in life, and those goals are what makes up happy. We all want certain things in life, or want to achieve certain things. Utilitarianism promotes happiness, happiness exclude pain, suffering, struggles, stress, and anything that makes one ‘unhappy’ or ‘sad’.
The concept of utilitarianism can create controversy in the engineering field. These issues are highlighted when talking about big data collection. On one hand utilitarianism can be used to prevent potential dangers, but on the other hand it can be seen as an invasion of privacy. When discussing utilitarianism, it is important to first gain a complete understanding of the term. Utilitarianism is the ethical belief that one 's actions should have the intention of promoting the largest amount of happiness for the largest number of people.
However, if Mill choices to look at my situation as a rule utilitarian’s then he would most likely disagree with my lying. Mill states, “Here the question is not whether one’s individual act would maximize goodness, but whether goodness would be maximized if everyone did the act (Ethics Theory and Issues, “John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): Revised Utilitarianism 127).” In this version of a utilitarianism, what's most important is
In this essay, I will explain the moral theory utilitarianism and outline its main claim; then I will present the most serious objection to utilitarianism: that it does not value justice; next, I will present utilitarianism’s refutation to the critique; lastly, I will evaluate utilitarianism’s reply and argue that utilitarianism can sufficiently answer this objection. While there are different schools within utilitarianism I will be focusing on its most common version: act utilitarianism (from this point on I will refer to it simply as “utilitarianism”). Utilitarianism is a moral theory that tells us what we should and should not do—more specifically, what is a virtuous or vicious action. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that
Utilitarianism is a normative moral theory based on consequentialism-its fundamental idea is that “do what produces the best consequence”. In more detail the theory dictates that actions are only right if they promote happiness and produce the greatest amount of happiness; “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”(Mill 1863) http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill2.htm Utilitarianism states that pleasure and happiness are intrinsically valuable and that pain and suffering are intrinsically invaluable and that every action that has value should either promote happiness or impede suffering. This emphasis on happiness or pleasure as a guide to making moral decisions, makes it a type of hedonism known as Hedonistic Utilitarianism and thus it can be criticized in a similar way to hedonism. (Luke Mastin,2008http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_utilitarianism.html.
Explain the differences between the two approaches: Utilitarian and Libertarian? Utilitarian Utilitarian is basically concerned with aspect of human welfare, it mainly explains the needs of the society, in which they can able to achieve the objective of human welfare through a team based approach. Utilitarian also consider the present facts and events for the promotion of human welfare in an effective way. Utilitarian is also based on value systems, in which it explains that, every man in world has some duty to do towards the society and for the betterment of the society, people has to sacrifice what they have. And the concept of Utilitarian also indicates that, our actions are based on the past events (R.M et al 1989), in which every person in the world is influenced by the past events that happened in their life.