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Ethical Theory: Extreme Utilitarianism) And Restricted (GHP)

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Before addressing the prompt, one needs to establish a baseline for utilitarianism. Mill’s definition of utilitarianism says that the best actions are the ones that produce the most happiness and the least amount of pain for everyone involved. There are two subcategories that fall under the umbrella of the ethical theory: extreme (act) and restricted (rule). Extreme utilitarians focus on a person’s possible actions and the different consequences they could produce. The Greatest Happiness Principle (GHP) is a system to determine which action creates the most happiness for everyone involved. Using the GHP, extreme utilitarians calculate the best course of action. The action which brings the least amount of unhappiness to everyone involved …show more content…

There should be no calculating of consequences because deciding what to do in a situation by a calculation could be influenced by personal bias. Hospers simply explains why rules are important. Laws punish people who break them, not because the most good will come from it, but because a crime has been committed. If the law is a bad law a society can do its best to change it. If one moral rule conflicts with another there is another rule that tells a person what to do in that specific situation. If one thinks about promises, but you promised to keep a secret that someone was going to commit suicide there would be a rule for that. Such as, one can break promises if it stops someone from committing suicide. Another important concept anyone studying the consequentialist theory of utilitarianism is the Doctrine of Negative Responsibility. This doctrine says that if a person is responsible for anything they are also responsible for things they allow to happen or fail to prevent. This is true even with actions you participate in every day. Also, the term intrinsic value is often mentioned within utilitarianism. Williams describes it as being something with non-consequential value, and the only thing that has intrinsic value is states of affairs …show more content…

Linda is the oldest out of all the patients, but allowing her to die would leave the physician with a lot of negative responsibility. By giving the liver to another of the three patients, the physician will make a man a widower, leave her children without a mother, leave the community with one less volunteer, and leave her family with one less source of income. If Joe does not receive the liver, the physician would not have as much negative responsibility even though Walmart would lose a worker and a child would become fatherless. However, it would make relatively little to no difference for the mother and the child as they had been living for several months without Joe’s money. With or without his money they would continue to survive. The physician’s level of negative responsibility for not giving Kelly the liver would also be relatively low. From the information given, Kelly’s death would leave her mom childless. It would also leave a college without a possible student, but it would eliminate Kelly’s worry about not being able to afford

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897 Witte Precis 2 In The Survival Lottery, John Harris argues about the difference between killing and letting die. He presents this information through questioning it in a thought experiment. In the thought experiment he presents a situation where two people are in need of organ transplants like a heart and set of lungs. If there is a stock of spare organs then to save the lives of the patients, all that the doctors would have to do would be to do the transplant. If they refused to do the surgery and the patient died as a result then the doctors essentially killed their patients.

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Utilitarianism or the Greatest Happiness Principle, accounts actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, Page 752). The morality of an action depends solely on the consequences of the action. According to Mill no amount of physical pleasure can replace mental pleasure. Every act is permissible once it serves as a means for pleasure and denounces pain. An Action’s consequences are measured and valued according to the number of individual’s happiness.

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The doctor has the medication to cure the disease except that the patient is an organ donor match for five other patients. The doctor chooses to let the patient die in order to use the organs of that patient to potentially cure the other five. This is an example of the Doctrine of Double Effect due to the doctor making a decision to allow the first patient to die in order to potentially save the other five. In the doctor’s mind, potentially saving five people is more necessary than surely saving the one patient. It is somewhat similar to playing a game where odds come into

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For utilitarians, happiness of many is more important than happiness of an individual. Such as, laws should benefit as many people as possible, even if some individuals rights and happiness is

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On Venus a day is longer than its year. A day on a planet means is the amount of time it takes the planet to make a complete rotation on its axis, and a year is the amount of time it takes for the planet to make orbit around its parent star. Therefore, Venus’s days are longer than its year, due to the fact that it takes the planet longer to rotate on its axis than it does to make one journey around the sun. Venus days are 243 earth days long while its year is only 225 earth days long. Venus rotates in the retrograde rotation, contrary to that of the other planets.

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Williams has an issue with the need to look at actions’ consequences to find any value in them. He believes that some actions have innate value regardless of their consequences. He compares the consequentialist’s position to that of a traveler who focuses only on the destination he is seeking to arrive at. Williams states that travelers don’t travel to arrive somewhere, they travel because they find value in the journey itself. There is something in this idea that can be applied to morality.

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Utilitarianism is one of the best-known theory under the consequentialism, and its idea is the Greatest Happiness Principle(GHP). According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Utilitarian believe that the purpose of morality is to

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M. Hare’s argument, it can be seen that there exists some issues with utilitarianism. Or, simply apply utilitarianism to this world, and use utilitarianism code to make every decision is wrong since the code of utilitarianism loss consistency in real world. According to utilitarianism, the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility, or happiness. However, happiness is complex. It is generally acknowledged that people who have their physical and emotional needs satisfied and their human rights guaranteed are happy.

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A number of problems surround the second question; the most obvious of which are limited time, the limited capacity of human foresight to calculate the maximum number of happiness, and the inability of the theory to advise on the time frame utilitarianism is to be applied to; how do you know the maximum number of happiness for the next 10 years doesn’t mean greater overall unhappiness in the next 50 years, so what time period should one keep in mind when considering an issue from a utilitarian stand point, 1 year, 5 years, 10, 20? This lack of clarity further adds to the impractical nature of the ideology. There are a myriad number of situations which seem very difficult to resolve without employing utilitarian principles and a very good example is the widespread use of utilitarian principles in bioethics. The best example here would obviously be the famous case of the conjoined twins Mary and Jodie. The facts in front of the court indicated that Mary was the parasitic twin who shared a heart with Jodie.

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According to Bentham, pure utilitarianism morally requires human beings to do what would produce the greatest total sum of pleasure minus the total sum of pain. Bentham reaches this definition via three conclusions:

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"Utilitarianism is a normative ethical theory that places the focus of right and wrong solely on the outcomes of choosing one action and or policy over others (Cavalier 1996) ". It is a morally demanding position and asks one to do the most to maximise utility, and thus always ask one to set aside personal interest for the sake of the whole. In the most extreme of situations, it demands the weaker person to be scarified for the greater good. Its principles, therefore, are characterised by two elements, happiness and consequentialism (Utilitarianphilosophy 2010). Utilitarians therefore believe that the purpose of morality is to make life better by considering one's actions and whether or not those actions increase the amount of good things in

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The main principle of utilitarianism is happiness. People who follow this theory strive to fulfill the “ultimate good”. The “ultimate good” is defined as ultimate pleasure with out any pain. It is said that the pleasure can be of any quantity and any quality, but pleasures that are weighted more important are put at a higher level than others that are below it. This ethical theory also states that if society would fully embrace utilitarianism then people would naturally realize their moral standing in the

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David B. Bohl is convincing the audience that the human race is responsible for the health of our planet. This ethical theory is based on Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism means that an individual must do a good that seeks the most happiness for the greatest number of people. In other words, a good that seeks more pleasure and less pain for the greatest number of people.

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The hedonic calculus has seven different criteria that must be considered to evaluate the balance between good and evil. This appears practical and easy to use in any situation; however, it has its issues. For example, Bentham suggested that all pleasure and pain should be measured equally. This causes a major problem when put into the context of business ethics, as it suggests that the pain experienced by a child forced to work in a factory is equal to a shareholder in a business gaining a little more profit – surely, this is unethical. J.S. Mill noticed this issue, introducing rule utilitarianism, in which he recognised the differences in different types of pleasures.

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36). In relation to this, Steele (1987, pp. 10-11, as cited in Lester 1999, par 37) also states that, “In utilitarianism, various consequences are considered and the impact of the consequences of an action is weighed in relation to the consequences of another course of

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