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Who Is John Stuart Mill Act Utilitarianism

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According to Bentham, the Nature has placed mankind under the governance of pleasure and pain. They point out what we ought to do and determine what we shall do. One hand there is the standard of right and wrong and on the other hand lies the chain of causes and effects. This is called the Principle of Utility(PoU). The more consistently the PoU is pursued, the better it is for the mankind. PoU approves or disapproves of any action according to its ability to boost or diminish the happiness. Bentham says that Utility is that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce pleasure or pain to those interested in it.
Utilitarianism deals with situations and decision ethics, generally believed to be the view that the morally right action …show more content…

Mill believed that for an action to be deemed right it must promote or result in happiness. In the same way, a wrong action would be one that brings about sadness. But, this could result in a false thought that we are talking about personal happiness. No. what matters is the happiness of a majority. It seems that utilitarianism achieves its goals by promoting moral values of honor so that all individuals work to serve the interests of others. In this sense it could be regarded as a standard for moral behavior. Deontological ethics provide a powerful contrast to utilitarianism, which does not place utmost importance on the consequence of an action when determining the moral validity of an …show more content…

In any given situation, one needs to choose the action that results in the greatest utility. But, finding out the act that will have the greatest benefit will be difficult. Our perceptions regarding the usefulness of things will definitely differ, as no one thinks similarly. Also, Utilitarianism does not care for the opinion of minority. There a lot of questions. Can we justify if an action has greatest utility for a greater amount of people but causes pain and suffering to a smaller group of people? Does the number or ratio of people pleased to dissatisfied have an effect? Can we make the value of a human life, rights, or opinion quantifiable? In quantifying them, are we killing the voice or the rights of the minorities? It is not always feasible to accurately judge who and how an action will affect people. Judging an action by the outcome is therefore hard to do before the consequences are clear; surely it seems better to judge an action by its intention, even though there are also problems with this. Furthermore the calculations required to adequately make an informed judgement based upon utilitarian ethics are tedious. In some instances, the people making decisions based upon utilitarian ethics may have no emotional interest. This gets us to a question that Is it really a humane thing to calculate issues pertaining to humans without emotion? Many individuals faced with decisions of importance may not have the ethical or moral

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