Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism

Act Util
1. greatest happiness for the greatest amount of people
2. Jeremy Bentham
  1. Hedonist - all humans are motivated by pleasure and pain
    1. seek to avoid pain at all costs
    2. "Nature has placed man kind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure"
  2. divsed the principle of utility as a means of reforming the legal system and as a test of the law
3. each situation should be assessed separately
4. You look at an action to determine what is moral, and from this general rules can be derived
5. Hedonic Calculus - considers how strong the pain or pleasure is: intensity, duration, certainty, remoteness, richness, purity,extent
6. advocates a relative approach to ethics
principle of utility must be applied to each situation
1. when faced with a moral dilemma, a person must decide which action will lead to the greatest good in a particular situation
Teleological - it is the telos (end or goal)of moral action, not the act itself or the moral rule you follow, that is good or of value
Consequentialist - moral judgements should be based solely on outcomes
1. Ends justify the means
Rule Util
1. John Stuart Mill
  1. maintained that the well being of the individual is of greatest importance
  2. Higher and Lower pleasures
    1. higher pleasures are qualitatively better and more important that the lower pleasures
    2. "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisified"
    3. EG reading a good book doesn't just give me more pleasure than playing angry birds - it gives me better pleasure
    4. pleasures of the mind are higher than those of the body
    5. higher - qualitative, lower - quantitive
2. advocates an absolutist approach to morality
  1. universal moral code that can be applied to all circumstances
3. protective of minority groups and less concerned with individual circumstances than the collective good
Preference
1. Peter Singer
  1. argues that our ethical decisions should benefit the best interests of those affected rather than to create pleasure
2. modified view of util
3. differs form normal util because the best consequence is understood to mean what furthers the best interests of those affected
4. satisfaction of an individual person's interests or desires is what matters most
5. when a person thinks ethically they must try to weigh up all of the interests of the affected parties, recognising that their own interest is not worth any more than anyone else's

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