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John Stuart Mill's Principle Of Utility

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1) The principle of Utility states that actions or behaviors are right in so far as they promote happiness or pleasure , We posit as our end the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of suffering. This is the telos or the Final End of all our actions. Ethics becomes a simple calculation of what will make the most amount of people happy while causing the least amount of suffering. It is called the principle of utility because it is saying that the outcome is what is important in ethics, not the way we approach it utility is a teleological principle. The feeling of pleasure and pain are biological events involving our central nervous system, which are controlled by our cerebral cortex. We obviously experienced pleasure when we perform …show more content…

We sometimes but not always experience pleasure when we do the right thing . We experience pain when these functions are left unfulfilled. In other word Utility is a. Mill says that people desire virtue , which is distinguished from happiness, However , Mill states that people love virtue because it is part of happiness. Mill also believed that if you can't make everyone happy, make the most people happy. The motivation for making a decision this way is that it's not always possible to account for all ethical or moral drawbacks to a decision so you have to make a compromise. To be inactive is worse. Perhaps the measure of happiness is not the best word. Maybe it should be replaced with 'contentment' or 'satisfaction and it is these judgments which have utility. I think that Mill believes that if decisions can be made with the greatest good in mind and no agenda then they give a human being the satisfaction that the right choice has been made. Perhaps the 'happiness' does not come from the choice made and whom it affects, but rather from the knowledge that it was the best possible …show more content…

For example; if lying is bad to everybody, then do not lie even if the consequences of lying are good.The contradiction is, he asserts living by the categorical imperative or the motivation of goodwill, but says emotions and desires have nothing to do with it. Saving others, whether from drowning, starvation or trolleys is in general an imperfect in Kant's ethics. It is a duty, because you would certainly want to be saved from either. But it's not a perfect duty, because it's possible to imagine situations where you wouldn't want to be saved. For instance, the people at either end of that trolley track might plausibly shout "don't save me, save the others!". I could never say "Steal from me!" because that would be a contradiction: if I had your permission, it wouldn't be stealing at all.Your perfect duties never contradict each other, and are always negative in nature: They demand that you abstain from some action.Your imperfect duties, however, can be active, and they can come in conflict, and they cannot usually be definitively fulfilled. You have a duty to help others, because you do want others to help you. But you'll never complete that duty, and you can't help everyone all the time. His categorical imperative stated that if you choose to act morally you should make this a universal law. He argued that this went beyond the constraints of utilitarianism. It was therefore

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In Defense of Utilitarianism, J.S. Mill In the excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s book, Utilitarianism, Mill defends the utilitarian theory against three different objections. The first, and strongest opposition to utilitarianism was the accusation that the emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure makes utilitarianism “a doctrine worthy of swine.” This was my favorite argument because Mill defended it so well stating that there are varying degrees of pleasure. He refers to them as “high” and “low” pleasures, which I do agree with.

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John Stuart Mill, one of the most influential philosopher of the nineteenth century, created a principle that states “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”. This is known as the Greatest Happiness Principle which focuses on what a man ought to do to promote happiness and prevention of unhappiness. When it comes to consequences in utilitarianism, this is what categorizes an action under “right” or “wrong”. Mill’s definition of happiness is based on the amount of pain and pleasure present in the consequence of the action. Happiness is the intended pleasure and absence of pain whereas unhappiness is pain and the deprivation of

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The John Stuart Mill would probably want me to pull the lever and changes the train route to the right, so I can save five peoples life just by killing one person. Mill thinks happiness is link with morality and the result that can minimize the damage, it’s something that Mill would advise others to do because killing five men instead of one can be a tragic mistake according to him. As he says “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Mill defines happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. He argues that pleasure can differ in quality and quantity”.

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we neglect our own perfection. While there are additional duties that make us better moral persons, it is difficult to analyze them under C1 or C2 because of the uniqueness of these duties which focus on improving our capacity to act dutifully. Given that there are no duties to self derivable from C1 alone in the Doctrines of Virtues, when we turn to a discussion of duties to others we face even more complications. All the duties of love (and likewise benevolence) are loosely derived from C1. While we might consider other’ ends, we may not give practical assistance to others, such as neighbor who is in bad circumstance.

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The High Renaissance was the brief period that started in 1495 and ended with the passing of Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 and Raphael in 1520. While the Early Renaissance served as the foundation that High Renaissance artists built their work on, there was no single unified style during this period. The lack of a defining style during this time period is shown through the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Prior to the Cinquecento, humanist scholars and art patrons shared the view of ancient Greek philosopher Plato that poetry was the highest form of art (Kleiner 624). In a departure from this view, artists and sculptors of the Cinquecento reached the high status held by poets and were able to become “international celebrities”

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According to Aristotle, his definition of pleasure mean that the golden mean is our goal that we want to achieve in every action we make in life. However, we can also be easily get foolish by our action and achieve self-indulgent instead and goes to the excess category. Meanwhile, John Stuart Mill wrote in his Utilitarians’ that for someone to feel pleasure; mean there’s no pain involve also known as pleasure-acquisition, and we always aim for higher achievement to continuous feeling pleasure. Utilitarian belief that we not only seeking for pleasure in quantity but also quality, and only those who had experience both lower and higher pleasure can fully understand. Thus, I agree with Aristotle because I feels that pleasure is just an temporary

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John Stuart Mill’s explains that we do not have to look for happiness because we can find it without searching for it, we do not have to focus entirely on our own happiness, but make other people happy in order to find happiness of your own. He explains that we do not have to search for happiness because it will come all we need to focus on is on subjects other than thinking of being happy. I agree with some of the idea’s John S.M. has when he argues that we should not search for happiness. I agree with John Stuart Mill’s when he states that happiness will come to you when you are not looking for it.

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So far, Mill has come to the conclusion that happiness is desirable and it is a criterion for morality. However, he says that the previous argument is not sufficient to reach the conclusion that happiness is the sole criterion for morality. The argument leading to this conclusion (3) can be presented as follows:

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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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Pursuing one 's own happiness at the expense of social happiness would not be moral under this framework. One of Mill 's replies to oppositions about utilitarianism is that the given analysis is not distinctive to utilitarianism, that any ethical theory would have such limitations. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this tactic? Does it really satisfy Mill 's stated objective, to dispel misconceptions about his theory?

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John Stuart Mill starts off his essay by claiming that many believe that the “greatest-happiness Principle holds that actions are right as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” (book, pg 1, p 258). This principle is often called the utility/utilitarian concept and it’s the foundation of morals. Stuart argues that more needs to be discussed concerning this theory, in particular what counts as pain and pleasure, and to what extent its left an open question (book, pg 1, p 258). However, Stuart goes on to explain that the clarifications needed do not affect the theory of life this theory of morality is based on. Nor does it affect the fact that (1) pleasure and freedom from pain are the only desirable

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In a critique of both the works, the paper adopts the Aristotelian thought citing that actions of human aims to fulfill goodness, which arguably is the happiness, one that arises from virtues practiced out of habit. Both the philosophers weigh in heavily on the role of happiness in the day to day lifestyles of humans. Adopting a sharp critic to the conventional principles of utility, Mill recognizes that happiness, as opposed to pleasure has a wider space in human attainments. He goes in deeper to explore the levels of pleasure

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(Mill, utilitarianism, p.697) To put this into simpler terms, Mill is essentially saying events or experiences are desirable only when it is a source for pleasure, so actions are good when they lead to higher levels of general happiness and they are deemed as bad when it lowers your general level of happiness. However, it is important to note utilitarianism doesn’t say it is morally right for everyone to purse what make them alone happy but instead morality is dictated by what increases the total amount of utility in the world. Pursuing your own happiness at the expense of the majority of social happiness would be viewed as wrong by utilitarian’s. Mill then proceeded to say that morality requires impartial consideration of the interest of everyone involved, its not just about your own happiness.

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Kant clarifies that consequences are not important, the primary thing in action is intentional. In this issue, it is not possible that all people help the hungry because of that they have these intentions. There is always one who says that nobody can blame me because of that I did not make them hungry. Moreover, Kant classifies the duty according to its certainty. He defines the perfect duty as a perfect duty such as telling the truth which is not flexible and all people must obey.

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Another concept in Kant’s Grounding of the Metaphysic of Morals is perfect duty. Perfect duties as those that are not flexible; there are no exceptions of these duties. According to Kant, “Not committing suicide is an example of a perfect duty to oneself” (30). There are no exceptions to allow a person to commit suicide and it should never

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