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Recommended: Flaws in utilitarianism

Does the principle of utility provide an adequate basis for justice? Would it, for instance, sanction the punishment of an innocent person under certain circumstances? (Explain the theory of utilitarianism and consider a situation that might test its validity.)

The principle of utility has evolved from an individual perspective to the general population. Jeremy Bentham, arguably the founder of utilitarianism, leaned towards hedoism and believed pleasure is the only intrinsic good and we should make choices based on the amount of pleasure we will receive. He was most interested in this concept on an individual level. The amount of pleasure or satisfaction we receive and pain or suffering we avoid from an action is the amount of utility it is determined to have. Bentham went so far as to invent hedonic calculus, which considers factors such as intensity, duration, certainty, remoteness, fecundity, amount of people affected, etc to determine an act's amount of utility. John Stewart Mill tried to counteract problems from Bentham's theory by using the greatest happiness principle which, “is not the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether”. Mill dived deeper into which kind of pleasure is better and determined that you have to take the word of people who have experienced a myriad of different pleasures and observe what they choose after experiencing all of them. While utilitarianism may seem feasible in theory, it doesn't take into account personal integrity, the longterm affects of an action..... making it impractical for society to adopt.
Identifying specific situations help us understand the problems associated with utilitarianism. Consider this scenario. David is a sheriff in an small t...

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... rebels wanted to know in only a few seconds what David's decision was, how could he weigh out every option and determine what is rationally the greater good? If utilitarianism was to be embraced by society, standards would have to be set in order to apply to these situations. Not everything can be measured by the same standard. Happiness is complicated and can be influenced by many different factors. How do we determine the aggregate, or overall, happiness of the members of a society? This would seem to present a real problem. For happiness is not, like temperature or weight, directly measurable by any means that we have available. So utilitarians must approach the matter indirectly. They will have to rely on indirect measures, in other words. These rules would be ones that in general are known to reliably produce the most amount of happiness. For instance, from

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