Absent Trust Within Utilitarianism

Absent Trust Within Utilitarianism

Evaluating decisions in terms of their morality is a complex, dense, and often times, problematic task. Utilitarianism, in which the end goal of a decision is to maximize utility, attempts to justify the morality of actions that are not always fitting to many moral standards or beliefs, but qualify because they have an end goal of maximizing one or a community’s happiness. However, the plausibility of utilitarianism is weak primarily because the model of morals which utilitarian’s follow often creates a lack of trust, which defeats the beginning purpose of utilitarianism. Furthermore, it lacks plausibility due to the fact that it is too impartial in situations that require one to make a decision in which the options cannot be held equally. Different forms of utilitarianism attempt to compensate for these objections, but in doing so either do not fully overcome them or move away for their utilitarian origins in order to do so. This is proven through examples of situations in which a utilitarian fails to do things commonly associated with being moral such as fulfilling death wishes, and through multiple questions that utilitarianism can simply not seem to answer.

Trust between humans is certainly one of the most powerful forms of dependency that exists. Often times, trust is used as a means to fulfill wishes or keep promises. As a utilitarian, one realizes that others want the peace of mind of knowing that their wishes will be fulfilled and promises kept more than anything. Because of this, the utilitarian simply gives that person the piece of mind they are in search of and then instead performs an action that increases their own utility. For example, if someone has an extremely ill relative wh...

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...are needed for ones happiness to be considered, meaning does the theory consider the happiness of babies or animals that are harder to communicate with in relation to emotions? Another issue with utilitarianism is the factor of accountability. If an action is chosen and unaccounted consequences occur, how far back does the chain of accountability go? Because of this, there is no clear solution in utilitarianism because often times, unexpected consequences do occur in which someone is needed to be held accountable for.

These arguments are not to say that that there is a problem with every cost-benefit analysis when it comes to morality because there has to be some way to decide between one action and another. That being said, however, utilitarianism simply has too many undetermined and unclear issues with their set of beliefs and processes for making decisions.