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Examples Of Utilitarianism In The Dark Knight

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One of my favorite movies The Dark Knight relates directly to the philosophy of utilitarianism. The theory of utilitarianism focuses on how to increase the amount of happiness in a society. In addition, utilitarianism seeks to distribute happiness to the most people in a society (Pojman and Vaughn 191). In the movie The Dark Knight the characters make important moral choices and utilitarianism can be used to understand the motives of the characters. There is a bigger picture to The Dark Knight instead of just being an action movie because of how the character’s decisions in the movie can be compared to utilitarian principles based on whether the characters make the right moral decisions. The utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and …show more content…

In addition, he was concerned with distributing the most happiness to the most people while decreasing the unhappiness (Pojman and Vaughn 191-192). John Stuart Mill believed that the quality of happiness is more important than the quantity of it. In fact, he puts happiness into different categories based on the emotions it relates to (Pojman and Vaughn 192). The heroes in the movie best represent the utilitarian ideas of Bentham and Mill. There are two important characters in The Dark Knight. The hero of the movie is Batman while the villain is the Joker ( Chris Nolan, The Dark Knight). What is significant is how the characters have different moral views on killing. The Joker is depicted as insane, ruthless and has the desire to bring chaos to the city of Gotham (Batman Wikia The Joker). What makes the Joker important is that he acts amoral. Amoral means that a person does not believe in a system of morals (Stein and Urdang 49). There are a few scenes in the movie which help to describe the Joker as amoral. In the first scene of the movie the Joker orders his men to kill each other. In an additional, scene he is shown

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He wants people to believe in Den Harvey, which is the myth of white light, a good guy who was never against the law and does great to protect people instead of letting people know he surrendered into Joker’s theory. Den did not believe in fairness but in arbitrariness, after his lovely lady died. Den took a few people who caught his fiancé and tried to kill his top boss and his family member, because they choose to save him instead to save his fiancé. The batman Bruce believed that the Joker is doing something wrong to destroy the city and he can’t kill him because if he kills the Joker, he will become like the Joker, an evil person. Batman believed that he is the only one that could take the blame, and doesn’t seem like a random victim although he didn’t do anything wrong.

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This paper describes three particular scenes throughout The Dark Knight and elaborates on those scenes in terms of three specific psychological principles. The psychological principles discussed in this paper is Kohlberg 's theory of postconventional morality, the social trap theory, and antisocial personality disorder. One scene that illustrates Kohlberg 's postconventional morality is Batman 's rather rough interrogation of the Joker. In this scene, Batman is interrogating the Joker in order to receive directions regarding where Harvey Dent and Rachel were (they were strapped up to chairs surrounded by bombs in different locations).

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In the 2008 film The Dark Knight directed by Christopher Nolan, it can be argued that the main character Batman is considered morally ambiguous, because even though he is a vigilante the way in which he does things does not always correspond with the law. Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne is a billionaire who dedicates himself to protecting Gotham City from its criminal underworld and from his archenemy, The Joker. One of the reasons Batman can be considered ambiguous is because he does immoral things such as hacking peoples cellphones and using the signals as a map of the city, even though he commits this unethical act, it is all done to protect the city from The Joker.

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Bernard Williams’ essay, A Critique of Utilitarianism, launches a rather scathing criticism of J. J. C. Smart’s, An Outline of a System of Utilitarian ethics. Even though Williams claims his essay is not a direct response to Smart’s paper, the manner in which he constantly refers to Smart’s work indicates that Smart’s version of Utilitarianism, referred to as act-Utilitarianism, is the main focus of Williams’ critique. Smart illustrates the distinction between act-Utilitarianism and rule-Utilitarianism early on in his work. He says that act-Utilitarianism is the idea that the rightness of an action depends on the total goodness of an action’s consequences.

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Secondly, he was incredibly smart, having mastered Latin by 8 years old, and by the age of fourteen, was studying Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. Finally, J.S.M was a heavy believer of utilitarianism, since the influence of utilitarianism sent him on a lifelong pursuit of social reform. I believe that John Stuart Mills most substantial idea, was his belief of individual liberty, because he stemmed away from his lifelong interest of utilitarianism, and took a look at society from a different

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What is wrong with the utilitarian conception of beneficence? Utilitarians base morality on the maximisation of utility, hence the concept of beneficence, trying to produce the most pleasures and suffer the least pains. Bentham, the founder of the doctrine of utilitarianism, recognised the fact that every moral argument will eventually fall back on the idea of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. In this essay, I will mainly focus on the aspect of individual rights and the inaccessibility of the concept.

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It was not until Mill’s late teens that he began to study Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarianism theory. “Reading Bentham satisfied Mill’s cravings for scientific precision and gave him a new way of looking at social intercourse” (Buchholz 97). Mill became so intrigued with Bentham that he decided to preach the Benthamite gospel in the Westminster Review, a publication started by his father and Jeremy Bentham. Mill’s views soon changed as he grew older. It is said that Mill had a mid-life crisis at the age of twenty because he took the Bentamite precision too far and actually forgot the ultimate goal of Utilitarianism in the first place, happiness.

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Contagion, a film released in 2011, is a great example of Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a theory that promotes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The movie’s strength lies with the characters and the way they portray a utilitarian view. In this film, many doctors and experts in disease control are desperately looking for a cure for an unknown disease that has spread through the world killing hundreds of thousands of people. Knowing that the virus could potentially kill off the entire population of the world, the CDC and its employees worked day and night for months and months to come up with a vaccination to health the vast majority of the population.

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Utilitarianism is a teleological ethical theory based on the idea that an action is moral if it causes the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. The theory is concerned with predicted consequences or outcomes of a situation rather than focusing on what is done to get to the outcome. There are many forms of utilitarianism, having been introduced by Jeremy Bentham (act utilitarianism), and later being updated by scholars such as J.S. Mill (rule utilitarianism) and Peter Singer (preference utilitarianism). When referring to issues of business ethics, utilitarianism can allow companies to decide what to do in a given situation based on a simple calculation. Many people would agree that this idea of promoting goodness

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