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Mill Utilitarianism Essay

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Damian Howard-Doney Philosophy 101 MWF Professor Hassell 9 March 2015 Mill The purpose of this essay is to critique Mill’s idea of utilitarianism. I am going to do this by introducing ideas from other philosophers as well as adding my own thoughts into the argument. In this section Mill’s tells us about his idea of “utilitarianism”, which is giving up your own happiness for the common good. An example of this is one individual giving up his/her happiness for their communities happiness. I do not agree with this for a few reasons. One being that if every person in the community gave up their happiness for the common good, then the common good’s happiness would not be there, because the community as a whole is not happy because they are giving that up for the general happiness. Secondly, I believe it would make sense that if the individuals of a community are happy, then the general mood of the community would be happiness. A supporter of Mill’s idea of utilitarianism might say that Mill describes pleasure with what makes us happy and that it is easy to sacrifice that for the common good.He supports …show more content…

One might also say that making a community focus on individual happiness rather than sacrificing their happiness will make them want to contribute to the common good even more. Someone who disagrees with my idea of utilitarianism would say that focusing on the individuals rather than the whole can cause tendencies of selfishness and people might not want to help the community because they rather help themselves. This might be true in some cases, but according to a study done by Syracuse University, when people are given incentives to help their community by focusing on themselves first then focusing on the community, showed that only 11% of people were selfish and did not bother helping the community.

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