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Mill's Argument Essay: Ethics Vs. Experience

679 Words3 Pages

Ethics are ultimately moral values that each individual has that lead to what they decide to do in life. Ethics contain two important parts, Reason and experience. There are many arguments on going on which part of ethics is ultimately more important. Although reason has a big part of Ethics I believe that experience is ultimately more important to fulfill all moral principles and values. Reason is required to justify ones moral feelings towards a situation and ultimately to doing ethics (Barbara, Page 8). Reason, Is like an intuition to all human beings, when you look at reason you usually look at how one thing is related to another, or how one situation is related to another ("Reason."). For example, reason is when human beings think about …show more content…

“We ought to do that which produces the greatest amount of happiness or pleasure for the greatest number of people” (Barbara, Page 32). To explain this principle more in depth you would look at the greatest number of people and decide what would produce the most happiness throughout everyone. Stated in the book Ethics by Mackinnon “utilitarianism must draw its evidence from experience.” Which Mill also believes that the only way to evaluate if something is morally right is to find reasons to support it. Therefore, Mill draws his evidence from experience, which leads him to his reasoning, he stats in Mackinnon “just as the only way in which we know that something is visible is its being seen, and the only way we can show that something is audible is if it can be herd, so also the only proof that we have that something is desirable is its being desired. Because we desire happiness, we thus know it is desirable or good” (Barbara, page 38). I believe that there is a difference of what we desire and what is good when we are looking at happiness. Furthermore, to find out if what we desire is really good for our happiness I believe you need experience, not just reason. Therefore there is a huge difference between people desiring to be happy, and they desire what they think will ultimately bring them

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