The Pros And Cons Of Decision Making

Decision-making is one of the hardest tasks individuals have to endure. Deciphering between whether or not the decision you make will benefit you, if it will hurt someone else, what are the pros, the cons, and if the decision you make is eleven moral in itself. When decision-making the study of ethics plays a major role as to which decision you ultimately decide on. Ethics evaluates the morality of actions based on principles set by theories, individuals or in some instances cultures. Morality is an enormous part of decision=making which comes into play every single day in human life. Ethicists create theories based on the morality that exists in our lives in regards to certain situations. In particular, the utilitarian theory is well known

Consequentialism analyzes a situation morality based upon the consequences that may come and those that could happen. An example from philosopher Kai Nielsen, came up with an example of the fat man that was stuck in the cave, with seven other people who happened to have a stick of dynamite. There is tidal wave that is coming and in one situation, either all seven of them will die, or in another situation they can blow up the fat man in order to escape the cave. In both of these situations there is a severe moral issue being tested, which is murder, in this case the consequence is either that seven people will die, or only one person will die. Ultimately, the fat man would be killed in order to save the lives of the seven others rather than to just save the fat man. The utilities of these seven will be higher from the fat man’s peril than from just saving the innocent fat man. According to utilitarianism, in order to evaluate a situation the utilities and disutilities involved must be weighed against another and be measured to come up with the net utility involved with the situation at hand. Surprisingly, in some situations the decision may cause pain, but the decision would cause less pain compared to the other option that was being considered. In addition, the foundation of utilitarianism, the principle of utility, is

Utilitarianism can deal with all moral issues that may arise, such as abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia. For a vision into utilitarian’s mind when deliberating whether or not an action is moral, we shall discuss how a utilitarian deals with euthanasia. Euthanasia, also known as assisted suicide, is a practice used to allow terminal patients to die with the assistance of their physician. An individual that is not aware of utilitarianism may dismiss the idea of euthanasia completely due to how vile it seems, but a utilitarian would consider the consequences from the situation, and the overall satisfaction from being euthanized before ruling it as immoral completely. The only consequences of this situation, is ultimately death, which is more immediate than watching the terminal patient suffer through the illness to the end, which could be prolonged and extremely painful. If euthanasia provides satisfaction to the patient, they will be put out of the pain and misery they are living through, then the procedure is morally correct under utilitarianism. To a utilitarian, euthanasia is morally okay as long as the correct methods are used to measure whether or not there is more pleasure or pain associated with