I believe that Williams provides an interesting and important issue found in consequentialism, and while Railton makes a few good points, I believe he creates as many problems as he solves. By defending consequentialism by dividing it into subjective and objective, I believe that he leaves the realm of true consequentialism. By being objectively consequentialist, you are no longer necessarily concerned with what your actions will cause. You are now concerned with what your actions did cause, and in turn use consequentialism as an evaluation tool for past actions. In theory, Railton believes that we will overtime learn from evaluating our decisions and then in the future be able to make better decisions. However, humans typically want to justify …show more content…
I also believe that since consequentialism is not being used as a decision procedure, it is not very helpful in allowing us to make decisions. Railton did briefly discuss an argument against this belief in which he provides the question, “Which modes of decision making should be employed and when.” This question to me is just as vague of guidance as objective consequentialism is. Also, you must know all the types of decision making and know when they are best used. Through Railton’s objective consequentialism, you would learn these things through experience, but that could take years, which could mean years of undesired and unwanted consequences for years before truly figuring it …show more content…
While he does seem to lessen the alienation of hedonism and reduce the paradox to a problem, however, the problem he creates is not much easier to solve than the paradox he just solved. In fact, it might even be a paradox in itself. By questioning how one should act in order to achieve maximum happiness even when you do not have to use the pursuit of happiness as a goal, you are simply trying to figure out how to achieve maximum happiness even when maximum happiness is not your goal. By wanting to achieve maximum happiness, without having the goal of happiness, happiness become your goal no matter what and leads to the alienation problem of other goals becoming tools. Objective hedonism is concern for one’s own happiness even if it minimizes overall happiness. This is a completely different view than the one he is attempting to defend in Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality. Instead, this begins to look like egoism, a theory in which all of your interests are selfish. This view of hedonism could also lead to minimizing happiness. If someone believed that world domination would make them happy and did not have to make hedonistic deliberations, they would probably pursue world domination. This would minimize overall happiness. Railton also believed that by using a multifaceted approach, alienation would be removed. This to me is
Williams identifies himself as a non-consequentialist not by offering a conflicting theory, but by pointing out the flaws of consequentialism. The crux of his argument is his rejection of what he calls negative responsibility: “for consequentialism, all casual connections are on the same level, and it makes no difference, so far as that goes, whether the causation of a given state of affairs lies through another agent, or not.”1 Williams posits that this insistence upon states of affairs reduces actors to causal nodes in a ‘state of affairs machine.’ To illustrate this point, he offers an example of Jim, a traveller lost in a South American jungle. Jim comes upon a town in which twenty of the residents are pressed against a wall, about to be executed by firing squad for daring to protest the government. The army captain present, Pedro, is unused to visitors, and being a hospitable man, offers Jim the opportunity to save the lives of nineteen of the villagers. However, to do so, Jim must take a gun and personally kill one of the residents.2
Consequentialism prohibit arbitrary moral prohibitions. If I want to condemn something as morally wrong so I have to show hos someone's life is made worse off. For consequentialism for example we cannot define homosexuality morally wrong if we cannot find bad consequences that arise from it.
Although there are countless moral theories that have been accepted throughout the all of human history, American philosopher John Rawls’ contractarian approach stands out from the rest. Whereas most of the other widely recognized theories, such as Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, focus primarily on the results of the action in question, Rawl’s theory has a different basis. The focus of contractarianism is predominantly on the original position the debating parties were in, which happens to be behind a veil of ignorance. Contractarianism seems as though it would be a perfect moral theory that would solve all the world’s problems, including the problems raised by Harry Gensler toward cultural relativism. However, as the cliché goes—it’s just too good to be true.
The first moral theory studied in the course this semester was classical utilitarianism. Utilitarianism at its base argument is the attempt to maximize utility. When a person uses the moral theory of utilitarianism, they are looking at that action that benefits the most people or that has the higher good for the most people. Utilitarianism say that a person does a certain action that helps or benefits a higher number of people then that action is moral good. Before discussing Utilitarianism further, there is a need to explain what it has to do with consequentialism. Consequentialism is when a person looks at actions or something that someone does and judges that action based of the criteria that of consequences that action brings. To a consequentialist the only way for an action to be moral good the action itself and what the outcome it brings must be good. Let’s say that person is talking a final on Tuesday and decides to bring a bag of candy to the whole class during their final to have something to keep them up. If this action was to benefit the whole class and that action brings good consequence than that action is morally right to a consequ...
Consequentialism is a punishment theory that provides moral justification for punishment by taking into account future consequences and by weighing the intrinsic value of a punishment against other available alternatives. The primary rationale for punishment is to bring the most good over harm, to deter or prevent crimes from occurring in the first place and to prevent future crimes from being committed. Utilitarianism would even consider punishing the innocent or pass a more severe sentence for a lesser crime if it could be determined that benefits to society outweighed the consequences of such punishment (Howard). For example, if it were believed that better crime deterrence or prevention could be achieved, a consequentialist would consider executing a murderer versus handing down a life sentence. Retributivism is a punishment theory that looks back at the specific nature of a crime and determines how much the victim suffered, in order to morally justify the severity of punishment. The moral emphasis is on righting a wrong and seeking justice by ensuring that criminals get what the...
I think consequentialism is plausible, but I cannot really be too sure about whether it is the truth or not. After all, it is simply a moral theory. However, I reali...
Brink says that then we can clear Mill of the charge of inconsistency about legal moralism. Since, Mill seems pretty consistent with his rejection towards legal moralism. This seems to bring up the debate between Mill and Stephen. Stephen is the author of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity: in which he talks about his defense of the uses of criminal law to promote virtue and curb vice. Mill is the one who provokes Stephen’s criticism, rendering that Mill is an anti-moralist. A century later, Lord Devlin revived Mill and Stephen’s arguments in which Devlin’s defense of legal regulation of homosexuality, prostitution, and pornography, and liberal criticisms. It can be tempting to reject legal moralism of Stephen and Devlin because of Mill’s anti-moralism, but temptation can be resisted.
I will begin by looking at the first claim that states that the consequential nature of utilitarianism is inappropriate. According to this argument, actions are judged according to the resulting consequences on the individual who undertook the actions without considering who motivated the actions. I will argue that this claim is wrong. This is because if the actions are morally up right, they will also produce the best consequences compared to any other actions. In my opinion utilitarianism is effective in shaping the behavioral character of the society as maximization of the good actions as well as minimization of evil deeds is
Nielsen’s next major premise is that if a consequentialist is faced with a decision from which the overall value of the consequences is unclear, then consequentialism should yield to the relevant deontological rule. That is to say, if it is possible that violating a deontological rule to bring about greater good may l...
Consequentialism is a term used by the philosophers to simplify what is right and what is wrong. Consequentialist ethical theory suggests that right and wrong are the consequences of our actions. It is only the consequences that determine whether our actions are right or wrong. Standard consequentialism is a form of consequentialism that is discussed the most. It states that “the morally right action for an agent to perform is the one that has the best consequences or that results in the most good.” It means that an action is morally correct if it has little to no negative consequences, or the one that has the most positive results.
Bentham realised that because this theory is based on the outcome of our actions it may be difficult to assess fairly which action will produce the most happiness. He therefore developed the ‘hedonistic calculus’, a form of calculating the happiness resulting from an act by assessing 7 different factors of the pleasure produced such as intensity and duration. In doing this Bentham was attempting to create some sort of ...
In determining what is the foundation of happiness, hedonism claims that it is pleasure with the absence of pain that is the only intrinsic good. An intrinsic good can be described as something that is good in and of itself. It is good not because it leads to something else, it is good for its own sake; as compared to an instrumental good, which is a means to an end. Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. Qualitative hedonists believe that there can be different levels of pleasure, meaning that some will be better than others. John Stuart Mill would be considered as a qualitative hedonist, which makes up part of his theory of Utilitarianism. In order to determine what is happiness, Mill establishes his Greatest Happiness Principle, which introduces the adoption of Hedonism. Mill’s argument for qualitative distinction of pleasures is inconsistent and problematic for hedonism, which brings about more problems than it solves for Utilitarianism.
Hedonism is a way of life that is rooted in a person’s experiences or states of consciousness that can be pleasant or unpleasant. The ethical egoist would state that a person should maximize his or her pleasant states of consciousness in order to lead the best life. Act Utilitarian on the other hand would state that these enjoyable states of consciousness should be maximized by one’s actions for everyone in order to attain the most utility. On the surface, this appears to be a good way to live, however, as Nozick states through his example of the experience machine that living life as a hedonist can be detrimental. It is a hollow existence that will ultimately be unsatisfactory because of the lack of making real decisions and relationships which are important to living a fulfilling life.
The principle of utility influences people to act on the wrong terms and encourages its followers to make decisions solely based on what produces the best results. Consequentialists, Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill believe that it doesn’t matter why a person does something or what motivates them to do so; but rather they think that the outcome is the most important factor in decision making. These two Utilitarian philosophers concluded that the greatest form of good in society was happiness, and that the absence of pain and the presence of pleasure should always be one’s number one priority and ultimately always one’s end goal. Encouraging members
I agree with Mill’s hedonistic view of happiness. Mill believes that pleasure is a fundamental value because it promotes happiness, and diminishes the feelings of pain and unhappiness. The objections to hedonism are invalid because it is always better to be intelligent and consciously aware of everything in one's life, as opposed to being content and selfish, mimicking the lifestyle of a pig whose pleasures have all been satisfied.