Utilitarianism

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This essay will present the key features of Utilitarianism and identify the problems of Utilitarianism to the extent to which they make Utilitarianism unacceptable.

Jeremy Bentham founded Utilitarianism. He lived at a time of great

change. With revolutions in France and America, demands were being

made for human rights and greater democracy. Bentham worked on legal

reform. Utilitarianism is associated with the principle of utility.

Utility means the amount of satisfaction or pleasure that somebody

gains from consuming a commodity, product, or service, i.e.; useful.

The hedonic calculus, which is his system for measuring how good or

bad a consequence is:

At the time Bentham put forward the theory it was instrumental. It

changed the way society was run and the way society now thinks for the

better. It dramatically made changes to the poverty in Britain

positively.

Theories that are interested in the ends are known as teleological.

Telos is Greek for the end. Therefore teleological means that the ends

justify the means, utilitarianism follows this rule. Utilitarianism is

the greatest goodness for the greatest number of people. The rightness

of actions depends on their utility, and the utility is measured by

the consequences, simply meaning the greatest good by moral actions.

If the consequences are good, then the moral actions are not as

relevant.

A positive example is “Lucy wins the lottery. Instead of keeping it

all to herself, Lucy decides to share it out with some of her friends,

because she thinks it will make them happy.”

Lucy is doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people and

is doing it using goodness ...

... middle of paper ...

...people’s common agreement about what is pleasure and what is pain.

There are problems concerning what some people would consider

pleasurable and what others would consider not pleasurable. Problems

arise such as taste in music, hobbies and beliefs.

In conclusion Utilitarianism has its political benefits, but is not

clear enough with some aspects. It doesn’t show what is unacceptable

in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism doesn’t have the flexibility of

considering individual circumstances and moral values have no

consideration in this theory. Utilitarianism is focused on quantity

rather than quality. It seems rather a simple theory ‘the greatest

good, for the greatest number of people’, however when you delve into

the theory it becomes rather too complicated. For people to live by a

theory it needs to be simple and clear.

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