Comparing Kant And Mill's Utilitarian Ethics

Although Kant and Mill wrote at completely different times, there is a clear disagreement towards utilitarianism ethics from Kant. Today I am going to discuss the arguments of Kant and Mill’s central ethical principles and how they pertain to actions being right or wrong. I will also compare their stances on lying. According to Immanuel Kant, good will is the only thing that is good. He thinks that human beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in an imperative from which all duties and obligations derive. This is where Kant’s categorical imperative comes into play in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Mill, on the other hand, is a utilitarian. He defines this as a theory based on the principle that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” (Mill p.186)

Kant’s being of the categorical imperative with its three formulations, and Mill’s principle of utility. Both of their principles are incorporated with a kind of universality; Kant’s case that of restricting one’s rules of action to those that one can will to be a universal law of nature, and Mill’s case considering the consequences of a type of actions for humans and creatures. The two of them have a two-stage conception of moral thinking: a critical stage and an application stage. Their proposed ‘duties to others’ correspond with one another by being not to lie, to be beneficent, not to steal, and not to deprive others of