Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure and oppose actions that cause unhappiness or harm. See Sen (1982). consequentialism holds that a moral act should be judged by its outcomes rather than by any inherent moral value encapsulated in the act itself (p. 43). Sharp criticisms of laissez-faire capitalism and militarism sit side-by-side with denouncements of . Whether an act is right or wrong depends only on the results of that act, The more good consequences an act produces, the better or more right that act, A person should choose the action that maximises good consequences, People should live so as to maximise good consequences. Scheffler, S. (2009). Ethics Defined (Glossary) View All 58 animated videos - 1 to 2 minutes each - define key ethics terms and concepts. 3. I simply assume that this group fights tuberculosis, and I do not look at the pamphlet because I do not care. For example, people often procrastinate from laziness or fear, knowing that they are hurting themselves in the long run. Utilitarianism Meaning. Web Privacy Policy (Premise), It can never be right to choose a worse whole set of consequences over a better. by Jason Blakely December 02, 2020. She holds a Masters degree in International Business from Lviv National University and has more than 6 years of experience writing for different clients. Utilitarianism and the Virtues., Harsanyi, John. A particular action is morally good only if it produces more overall good than any alternative action. Hence consequentialism conflicts with common sense. So you may prefer a different version of consequentialism. The rights and wrongs of consequentialism. For example, it's a bad thing for a man to rape and beat a woman (regardless of consequences), but it's even worse if as a result of the brutality, her unborn daughter is killed and the rape victim who survives gets AIDS. Other versions of consequentialism may be generated by making small changes in this theory, as we shall see, so long as the new theory stays faithful to the broad idea that morality is all about producing the right kinds of overall consequences. Second, more concretely, to be moral is to care about people. For example, welfare consequentialism, or welfarism, maintains that all that matters or is good is welfare, or well-being. Utilitarianism judges consequences by a "greatest good for the greatest number" standard. Any one of these collections provides an excellent introduction to consequentialism. 8 yr. ago What if I told you Kantians are also concerned about the consequences of their actions? Now, some kinds of thing do not suggest any standards of goodness: consider good pebble. The picture is roughly as follows. Differences Between Consequentialism And Kantianism We formed four focus groups containing 6-9 participants each. That is, one must look to see whether financial benefit outweighs the health drawback, and whether the benefit to me outweighs the harm to you. The University of Hong Kong Ethical egoism | Definition, Examples, Arguments, & Facts William Haines BBC - Ethics - Introduction to ethics: Duty-based ethics There was something right about my not donating. Perhaps most consequences of most actions we decide on are like that: not actual outcomes, but only probabilities of outcomes. Its standard is high. It is unclear, then, whether the standard to which we should hold theories of morality is that they must explain why morality is easy to know about or why morality is terribly hard to know about! We firmly agree, for example, that equality and rights are very important, that it is not wrong to favor our family and friends over strangers, that it is wrong to torture children, and so on. Good actions are the ones that produce the least harm. So, they agree that consequentialism is true. A billionaire needs an organ transplant. This controversial line of thought is not only an objection to the above argument for consequentialism, it is also an argument against consequentialism. The result justifies the means are based on a consequentialism. For example, if a certain action would be good for the bank account but bad for the health, there is a financial reason for it and a health reason against it. Now, one reply to the extreme examples is that such opportunities are extremely unusual. The moral philosophy behind deontological ethics suggests that each person has a duty to always do the right thing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The resulting confusion is defused by showing that whether Sen's CA . But of course I know that the position of the hand has no effect on my speed. (At least that is true of the surgery example.) It may be a benefit of a particular kind: a financial benefit, a heath benefit, entertainment or knowledge. This question has been posed to many years, and it is a classic example of consequentialism philosophy in action. "Do not lie" is the most taught ethics by our parents, teachers, and everyone around. One could phrase consequentialism in general terms as, for example, the theory that there is some feature of consequences of actions such that the right action is the one whose consequences have that feature to the greatest degree.. See Rawls (1955). how, for example, do you measure happiness? Negative consequentialists focus exclusively on avoiding unfavorable outcomes when evaluating decisions or behaviors (Scheffler, 2009). Eventually you decide to toss the coin, you win, and I bake the cake. Therefore, it is important to account for the moral agent's community or communities within which she operates. Consequentialism in Ethics | Definition, Examples & Analysis | Perlego This makes the crime much, much worse. And it is commonly thought that the main kinds of actions that can be morally right or wrong are intentional actionsthings we do deliberately, not things like hiccups or small twitches. Impartiality: The view that the identity of individuals is irrelevant to the moral value of an outcome. For example, when faced with multiple simultaneous patients in the emergency department it is important to have a way of reaching a decision quickly about which patient to attend to first. Her expectation that it will produce or promote that good outcome is her reason for performing the action. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a plain and simple definition of consequentialism: Of all the things a person might do at any given moment, the morally right action is the one with the best overall consequences. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism/. List of the Disadvantages of Utilitarianism. I start with some easy examples. Examples of how Everyday Life Situations were Formulated by the Social The philosophy of consequentialism is based on the belief that the moral and ethical value of one's action should be judged by the consequence of such action. First, abstractly, to be moral is to do ones rational best to do what is objectively right. But since many people regard it as not quite in the spirit of consequentialism and many of the issues surrounding Rule Consequentialism are unique to it, we shall say little more about it here. people don't agree on what should be assessed in calculating good consequences. Most of the best recent work on consequentialism is collected in the following anthologies. One might suppose that if a person has two conflicting desires, it is rational for her to replace them with a single compromise desire. Consequentialism seems to tell us to make all our decisions by thinking about overall consequences. The concept of consequentialism has been widely discussed in philosophical circles for centuries, and its implications are far-reaching. Consequentialism has been criticized for ignoring individual rights in favor of collective outcomes. Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics | Reviews | Notre Dame Hence it would be misleading to say that consequentialism is the view that morality is all about results. Common-sense morality and consequentialism. Utilitarianism - Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics For example, you may do something simply because you have promised or because it is required by law, without looking to the consequences. Today, consequentialism has many different forms developed over the years. Goodness and Utilitarianism., Williams, Bernard. There are many moral questions on which common sense is divided or simply stumped. For example, if eating a certain food will bring an individual pleasure but harm others, it is considered moral according to this theory. Duty-based . Another worry is that 1 and 2 do not imply 3. The usual Consequentialist view is that a 50% chance of a certain good outcome is half as good as that good outcome itself, and a 10% chance is one tenth as good. Although the majority of people would benefit from this idea, most would never agree to it. In other words, one must ask whether the action promotes benefit overall. Perhaps it does not involve explicitly thinking about the consequences at all. In economics, we can replace the terms . Classical utilitarianism includes two further elements: hedonism and totalism. Perhaps our reason for each action is a combination of two things: the idea that the action will produce benefits and the idea that the action is morally permissiblethat it would not violate any principles of morality. Note that if what matters is the total amount, then it does not matter whether the happiness belongs to you or your friend or a strangeror even a dog, if dogs can have happiness. Also, when you are about to follow through on a project you have started, you should not stop to calculate the overall consequences anew before you proceed. That assumption may be mistaken, because it is not true that an authority on whether something has a certain feature has to know exactly what that feature is. Consequentialist theories don't pay direct attention to whether an act is carried out with good or bad intentions; most people think these are highly relevant to moral judgements. I do not donate. One argument for consequentialism begins from the premise that whatever a person does, she does in order to produce some sort of good result. One key theory is consequentialism, which says that an individual's correct moral response is related to the outcome/ consequence of the act and not its intentions/ motives. One might object that if the objectively right action is the one whose consequences are best, then general social opinion cannot be an authority on objective rightness, even on those issues where the general opinion is clear. A more general reply to the claim that consequentialism advises us to meddle in other peoples business is that even where secrecy would not be involved, there are Consequentialist reasons for you to avoid direct meddling with others private spheres and personal affairs. But a problem with setting a very low speed limit is that driving very slowly takes up time. Viktoriya is passionate about researching the latest trends in economics and business. While it may violate certain international humanitarian laws due to immediate risks associated with these activities (rule level), they ultimately benefit humanity if peace can be brought about (state level). 3 says that she has another desirethe desire that all her other desires be fulfilled as much as possible. It teaches: Rule consequentialism bases moral rules on their consequences. And since your dollar can usually do more good for desperate refugees than for yourself or your friends, consequentialism seems to hold that you ought to spend most of your dollars on strangers. is it happiness, pleasure, satisfaction of desire or something else? Here too you end up having had twice as much happiness as I had, so the total happiness we had is three times the happiness I had. A Plague of Catholic Cafeteria Consequentialism. while it sounds attractive in theory, its a very difficult system to apply to real life moral decisions because: every moral decision is a completely separate case that must be fully evaluated, individuals must research the consequences of their acts before they can make an ethically sound choice, doing such research is often impracticable, and too costly, the time taken by such research leads to slow decision-making which may itself have bad consequences, and the bad consequences of delay may outweigh the good consequences of making a perfect decision, but where a very serious moral choice has to be made, or in unusual circumstances, individuals may well think hard about the consequences of particular moral choices in this way, some people argue that if everyone adopted act consequentialism it would have bad consequences for society in general, this is because it would be difficult to predict the moral decisions that other people would make, and this would lead to great uncertainty about how they would behave, some philosophers also think that it would lead to a collapse of mutual trust in society, as many would fear that prejudice or bias towards family or other groups would more strongly influence moral decisions than if people used general moral rules based on consequentialism, fortunately the impracticality of act consequentialism as a general moral process means we don't have to worry much about this, Whether acts are good or bad depends on moral rules, Moral rules are chosen solely on the basis of their consequences, an act is right if and only if it results from the internalisation of a set of rules that would maximize good if the overwhelming majority of agents internalised this set of rules, Rule consequentialism gets round the practical problems of act consequentialism because the hard work has been done in deriving the rules; individuals don't generally have to carry out difficult research before they can take action, And because individuals can shortcut their moral decision-making they are much more likely to make decisions in a quick and timely way, Because rule consequentialism uses general rules it doesn't always produce the best result in individual cases, However, those in favour of it argue that it produces more good results considered over a long period than act consequentialism, One way of dealing with this problem - and one that people use all the time in everyday life - is to apply basic rules, together with a set of variations that cover a wide range of situations. For example, perhaps we can do the most good overall if we forcibly stop people from wasting their time and energy on pointless or harmful things like driving SUVs, watching television, eating meat, following sports, and so on. Read more. A normative theory in moral philosophy, it became prominent after being put forth by the renowned philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in 1788. 36 short illustrated videos explain behavioral ethics concepts and basic ethics principles. A Critique of Utilitarianism, in. 1. Now, this objection does not directly apply to Plain Consequentialism or Plain Scalar Consequentialism, for these theories do not say that we should think about consequences. Two Departures from Consequentialism., Brink, David. The defender of Reasonable or Dual Consequentialism might argue that the objection has misunderstood what it is to have a reasonable estimate of an actions consequences. This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). For example, if you think that the whole point of morality is (a) to spread happiness and relieve suffering, or (b) to create as much freedom as possible in the world, or (c) to promote the survival of our species, then you accept consequentialism.

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