Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism

1. Act Util

   • greatest happiness for the greatest amount of people
   • Jeremy Bentham
     • Hedonist - all humans are motivated by pleasure and pain
       • seek to avoid pain at all costs
       • "Nature has placed man kind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure"
     • divsed the principle of utility as a means of reforming the legal system and as a test of the law
   • each situation should be assessed separately
   • You look at an action to determine what is moral, and from this general rules can be derived
   • Hedonic Calculus - considers how strong the pain or pleasure is: intensity, duration, certainty, remoteness, richness, purity,extent
   • advocates a relative approach to ethics

2. principle of utility must be applied to each situation

   • when faced with a moral dilemma, a person must decide which action will lead to the greatest good in a particular situation

3. Teleological - it is the telos (end or goal)of moral action, not the act itself or the moral rule you follow, that is good or of value

4. Consequentialist - moral judgements should be based solely on outcomes

   • Ends justify the means

5. Rule Util

   • John Stuart Mill
     • maintained that the well being of the individual is of greatest importance
     • Higher and Lower pleasures
       • higher pleasures are qualitatively better and more important that the lower pleasures
       • "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisified"
       • EG reading a good book doesn't just give me more pleasure than playing angry birds - it gives me better pleasure
       • pleasures of the mind are higher than those of the body
       • higher - qualitative, lower - quantitive
   • advocates an absolutist approach to morality
     • universal moral code that can be applied to all circumstances
   • protective of minority groups and less concerned with individual circumstances than the collective good

6. Preference

   • Peter Singer
     • argues that our ethical decisions should benefit the best interests of those affected rather than to create pleasure
   • modified view of util
   • differs form normal util because the best consequence is understood to mean what furthers the best interests of those affected
   • satisfaction of an individual person's interests or desires is what matters most
   • when a person thinks ethically they must try to weigh up all of the interests of the affected parties, recognising that their own interest is not worth any more than anyone else's