Utilitarianism Vs Deontological Ethics

I will consider this topic through the lens of two types of ethics which are utilitarianism which was practised by Bentham and Deontological ethics which had practitioners in the form Immanuel Kant.

Bentham’s version of utilitarianism the highest principle of morality whether personal or political morality is to maximise the general welfare or collective happiness. The overall balance of pleasure over pain, it bases itself on achieving maximum utility. The reasoning to validate this point is that we are all governed by our pain and pleasure and they are or sovereign masters. Any moral system has to take account of them and they are accounted by maximising. So when we look at the ethical dilemma of the car if we base our understanding on Bentham’s

Meaning that since the focus is highly based on achieving the greater good we can argue that there is always a chance that minority is always at loss. in the case of the driverless car most of the cases it would end up killing its owner. Which is morally inhibiting in the sense that people who buy these cars do not have choice which means that since the car is programmed in a specific way they will never be able to survive. Second objection is that it is really difficult to make a scale to determine how do we hierarchize pleasure, with driverless car how do we hierarchize whose life is more important and whose is not. Simply basing it on greater good will just be wrong in the sense that people in the car are always killed and they might find it immoral. Even though Utilitarianism leads to greater good it fails to recognize the importance of the minority and there is no scale to hierarchize pleasure in the sense there is no scale to determine whose ethics is more important at what time, If the utilitarian calculus be enlarged and modified to accommodate humanitarian concerns like concern to respect individual rights also to address distinction between higher and lower pleasure then it can be used to solve the ethical dilemma of the driverless

For example in the case of German family hiding the Jews from the Nazi’s during that period, if the Nazi’s command them to hand in any Jews they are hiding if they reveal that they are hiding Jews and let the Nazi’s take them. It would be the most unethical decision. The reason is that the german family is acting the most rational since they are saying the truth which is logically correct and it leads to chaos. But is their decision to sacrifice the Jews actually ethical? Definitely not you are basically sacrificing human lives which is probably the most unethical thing that they can do. So basing Morality on reason rather than on concentrating the greater good of the society and human emotion can sometimes not be the most ethically correct thing to