Sentences Generator
And
Your saved sentences

No sentences have been saved yet

"utilitarianism" Definitions
  1. the belief that the right course of action is the one that will produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people

666 Sentences With "utilitarianism"

How to use utilitarianism in a sentence? Find typical usage patterns (collocations)/phrases/context for "utilitarianism" and check conjugation/comparative form for "utilitarianism". Mastering all the usages of "utilitarianism" from sentence examples published by news publications.

She makes them contemporary by playing with scale and utilitarianism.
The ambition was thrilling: Somebody got utilitarianism in my comedy!
And this time, the message is a critique of utilitarianism.
By contrast, classical utilitarianism cares about both suffering and happiness.
Instead of inundating his life with goods, Mill believed in utilitarianism.
He wrestled with Immanuel Kant's theories on ethics versus John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism — seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people — is totally unrealistic.
Mill never did abandon utilitarianism, though he later modified Bentham's doctrine in subtle ways.
An episode exploring the interaction between utilitarianism and, say, string theory would be pretty cool.
The question is a classic jumping off point for discussions about utilitarianism, consequentialism and fairness.
Utilitarianism in its crudest and cruelest form won out over Kantianism at its most noble.
Utilitarianism confronts the notorious difficulty of ranking quality of life and ignores the moral imperative of urgency.
Utilitarianism only takes you so far — it does matter that you take capital from a bad actor.
While a merit-based immigration system may appear fair and practical, it is humiliating in its utilitarianism.
Thanos's plan is fairly crude utilitarianism, but not so crude that it can be dismissed out of hand.
John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" gave me the kind of ethical guidance that every person needs — religious or otherwise.
But their animating philosophy is really utilitarianism: the idea that doing good means maximising the overall level of happiness.
For institutions that pay taxes and have to answer questions from reporters, rule utilitarianism provides an easier way out.
The focus has shifted to utilitarianism, with both Eleanor and Chidi sacrificing their personal happiness for the greater good.
But such stark utilitarianism sits poorly with how most people view the world, because AVs would still cause a lot of deaths.
Others employ a simplistic Craigslist-style utilitarianism that feels like a throwback to an era when web pages were coded by hand.
The remnants of this phase of concrete Modernist architecture were everywhere, giving evidence of its abstract utilitarianism, which had remained viable for housing.
After a couple of decades of Audit Commission-style utilitarianism it is wonderful to have policy thinkers addressing issues like "belonging" and "beauty".
Utilitarianism aims to maximize total benefit, generally measured by the remaining life years — or expected remaining high-quality years — that decisions will save.
Even though it's been over 30 years, Veidt is still the same man with the same extreme, amoral utilitarianism he had years ago.
I'm curious if you think there are some useful aspects of previous moral philosophies — virtue ethics, utilitarianism — that are compatible with your biological view.
Herein lies the trouble: While people favor utilitarianism in the abstract, their feelings become muddied when they're the ones who might be making the sacrifice.
The premise is that the students are given a crash course in ethical philosophy that acquaints them with influential ideas, such as utilitarianism and deontology.
While Kimmy's not too keen on publicly talking about her history as a mole woman, she remembers the theory of utilitarianism she just learned in philosophy.
But the party was also a celebration of the Telfar brand, which puts a rigorously original spin on middle-class workwear while emphasizing functionality, utilitarianism and minimalism.
There are three theories of how to make ethical triage decisions, according to David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics: egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and prioritarianism.
Consider the person who originated utilitarianism, the calculus of pleasure and pain that has done so much to advance animal welfare — namely, the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
But their rationale when shopping for a new device is firmly rooted in old school utilitarianism: get the widest and deepest set of features for the lowest possible price.
And in Paris, Lemaire showed a more understated take on utilitarianism, with light cotton gilets and work shirts coupled with pants that were belted at the waist and ankle.
My students and I often study utilitarianism, the moral theory that asks us to measure pleasures and pains in seeking to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.
With sleek cuts and smart fabrics, his critically acclaimed fall 2018 offering paired heavy tweeds with workwear-appropriate dresses and added a dash of utilitarianism with walking boots and backpacks.
It asks people to look at a potential decision through five different ethical lenses: rights, fairness and justice, the common good, utilitarianism (which means benefits versus harm), and virtue ethics.
"I registered that name because I liked that it juxtaposed the German utilitarianism of the word with this 1950s sort of graphic style we did with the magazine," Cole said.
"As a brand, we do things that are refined but never pretentious or stuffy, and the TENCEL™ brand delivers that utilitarianism, because we live in our clothing," Smilovic explains.
Utilitarianism, Mill thought, called for various social reforms: improvements in gender relations, working wages, the greater protection of free speech and a substantial broadening of the British electorate (including women's suffrage).
Contemporary philosopher Peter Singer has been outraging people for years by pushing utilitarianism to its limits, reaching conclusions many find abhorrent (like his position that it is justifiable to kill babies with severe disabilities).
He mentions the publication of Mill's "Utilitarianism" in 1863, but not another and surely more important event that year, the meeting at a London pub that drew up a common code for association football.
Forcing pairs of individuals to copulate against their will would be state sanctioned rape and violate multiple constitutional provisions in addition to virtually all ethical frameworks—with the possible exception of some forms of rigid utilitarianism.
Increasingly, we cling to codes of popular invention, whether Kardashian beige or Supreme red, Eileen Fisher minimalism or tech-bro utilitarianism, sorority sisters in Lilly Pulitzer or black-clad techno nerds outside of Berghain in Berlin.
"The Trolley Problem" is probably being shown in classrooms around the country now (if it's not...what are you doing) to illustrate the ethical conundrum of utilitarianism: Why save one life when you could save five?
Churchland fails to note key features of Kant's moral theory, including his view that we must never treat humanity merely as a means to an end, and offers critiques of utilitarianism that its original adherents addressed.
Pros: Sturdy, high-end leather and rubber, steel shank for support, not outrageously priced, hand-stitchedCons: Maybe not the most fashion-forward boots you'll come across this season (or next), but their beauty lies in their utilitarianism
Arriving in the wake of the boho-chic early aughts, the utilitarianism of the post-recession days and the sentimental softness of the mid-2010s, these designers are building an aesthetic language for now: sly, assertive and somewhat unhinged.
Republicans have long been more or less happy with the presumed utilitarianism of teaching future diplomats the languages they'll need to communicate, but balk at imparting the cultural aspects that might help students acquire the context for true understanding.
Most optimal tax papers tend to assume a kind of crude utilitarianism: Taxes should be used to maximize the public welfare, roughly estimated, so you should only take money from the rich so long as doing so boosts overall welfare.
Hey, what is her relationship with with Ritsuko, someone who was once her best friend but is now falling apart because they take different opposing views on things like utilitarianism and how far are you willing to go to pursue science and to save the world.
As Fry looks to the future, she explores humanity in a reality where automated decisions are rendered superior to human discretion, where data and code disregard private concerns for utilitarianism, and where algorithms pit the need for empathy and compassion against the desire to achieve objective fairness.
Poring over retro ads for skin-crawling Jell-O salads with vegetables and tuna encased in green gelatin—or the "57 Prize Winning Recipes from H.J. Heinz Co." cookbook—it's a reminder that dreams of a Jetsons future, or wartime utilitarianism, sometimes got in the way of palatable cooking.
And those complexities of subjective morality, utilitarianism, and acceptable collateral damage are all tied into stomach-sinking revelations: The characters in these stories are trapped in horrible places, the utopia they've been sold is a lie, and it's a surprisingly small jump from that supposed utopia to their horrible reality.
At the same time, the centrist social democratic ideal of Collier's youth, rooted in the habits of civic cooperation and mutual aid, gave way, on the one hand, to the arid utilitarianism of economists and, on the other, to the rights-oriented liberalism of lawyers who encouraged people to understand themselves as victims seeking redress rather than as citizens seeking solidarity.
In Utilitarianism. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 130. Two-level utilitarianism is virtually a synthesis of the opposing doctrines of act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism.
In Principles (1973), R. M. Hare accepts that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism but claims that this is a result of allowing the rules to be "as specific and un-general as we please." He argues that one of the main reasons for introducing rule utilitarianism was to do justice to the general rules that people need for moral education and character development and he proposes that "a difference between act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism can be introduced by limiting the specificity of the rules, i.e., by increasing their generality." This distinction between a "specific rule utilitarianism" (which collapses into act utilitarianism) and "general rule utilitarianism" forms the basis of Hare's two-level utilitarianism.
This is a key area of variation because the key difference between negative utilitarianism and non-negative kinds of utilitarianism is that negative utilitarianism gives more weight to negative well-being.
In ethics, Smart was a defender of utilitarianism. Specifically, he defended "extreme", or act utilitarianism, as opposed to "restricted", or rule utilitarianism. The distinction between these two types of ethical theory is explained in his essay Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism.J.J.C. Smart, "Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism", The Philosophical Quarterly, Oct.
The major division within utilitarianism is between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. In act utilitarianism, the principle of utility applies directly to each alternative act in a situation of choice. The right act is the one that brings about the best results (or the least amount of bad results). In rule utilitarianism, the principle of utility determines the validity of rules of conduct (moral principles).
Moreover, the ethical philosophies of Utilitarianism (especially preference utilitarianism) and Pragmatism commonly are identified as greatly employing casuistic reasoning.
Like other kinds of utilitarianism, negative utilitarianism can take many forms depending on what specific claims are taken to constitute the theory. For example, negative preference utilitarianism says that the utility of an outcome depends on frustrated and satisfied preferences. Negative hedonistic utilitarianism thinks of utility in terms of hedonic mental states such as suffering and unpleasantness. Negative Average Preference Utilitarianism makes the same assumptions on what is good as negative preference utilitarianism, but states that the average number (per individual) of preferences frustrated should be minimized.
Negative utilitarianism is thus a form of negative consequentialism.“One form of negative consequentialism is negative utilitarianism”. Animal Ethics (2014) "Negative Consequentialism", Ethics and Animals Much more has been written explicitly about negative utilitarianism than directly about negative consequentialism, although since negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism, everything that has been written about negative utilitarianism is by definition about a specific (utilitarian) version of negative consequentialism.
Weak rule utilitarianism (WRU) attempts to handle SRU counterexamples as legitimate exceptions. One such response is two-level utilitarianism; more systematic WRUs attempt to create sub-rules to handle the exceptions. But as David LyonsForms and Limits of Utilitarianism, 1965. and others have argued, this will necessarily tend to collapse into act utilitarianism.
Act utilitarianism evaluates an act by its actual consequences whereas rule utilitarianism evaluates an action by the consequences of its general or universal practice (by all other persons, and perhaps into the future and past as well). Rule utilitarianism is sometimes thought to avoid the problems associated with act utilitarianism.Lyons, David. Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism.
Versions of (negative) utilitarianism can also differ based on whether the actual or expected consequences matter, and whether the aim is stated in terms of the average outcome among individuals or the total net utility (or lack of disutility) among them. provides an overview of the many ways in which consequentialism can be varied. Since utilitarianism (and negative utilitarianism) is a kind of consequentialism, much of it applies to utilitarianism and negative utilitarianism as well. Section 1.
Act utilitarianism states that in all cases the morally right action is the one which produces the most happiness, whereas rule utilitarianism states that the morally right action is the one that is in accordance with a moral rule whose general observance would create the most happiness. In terms of two-level utilitarianism, act utilitarianism can be likened to the 'critical' level of moral thinking, while rule utilitarianism can be likened to the 'intuitive' level. However, it is important to note that rule utilitarianism as it is traditionally understood only affirms moral intuitions when their general adherence leads to the greatest happiness.
Smith focused on forms of rule utilitarianism, arguing, contra David Lyons,David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). that act utilitarianism and full compliance forms of rule utilitarianism do not always prescribe the same actions, and maintaining that the project of finding an appropriate definition for “consequences” within rule utilitarianism had been misconceived and was doomed to failure."David Lyons on Utilitarian Generalization", Philosophical Studies, Vol. 26 (October 1974), 77-94 (as Holly S. Goldman); and “Measuring the Consequences of Rules”, Utilitas, Vol.
Negative hedonistic utilitarianism thinks of well-being in terms of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. There are many other variations on how negative utilitarianism can be specified. The term "negative utilitarianism" was introduced by R. Ninian Smart in 1958 in his reply to Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Smart also presented the most famous argument against negative utilitarianism: that negative utilitarianism would entail that a ruler who is able to instantly and painlessly destroy the human race would have a duty to do so.
Critics sometimes cite such prohibitions on leisure activities as a problem for act utilitarianism. Critics also cite more significant problems, such as the fact that act utilitarianism seems to imply that specific acts of torture or enslavement would be morally permissible if they produced enough happiness. Act utilitarianism is often contrasted with a different theory called rule utilitarianism. Rule utilitarianism states that the morally right action is the one that is in accordance with a moral rule whose general observance would create the most happiness.
Utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals.Duignan, Brian. [1999] 2000. "Utilitarianism" (revised).
"Classic Utilitarianism" shows the many distinct and variable claims that make up Classic Utilitarianism. Negative utilitarianism can aim either to optimize the value of the outcome or it can be a satisficing negative utilitarianism, according to which an action ought to be taken if and only if the outcome would be sufficiently valuable (or have sufficiently low disvalue)., states satisficing utilitarianism as follows: "Satisficing utilitarianism An action ought to be done if and only if it would bring about a sufficient level of total well-being." A key way in which negative utilitarianisms can differ from one another is with respect to how much weight they give to negative well- being (disutility) compared to positive well-being (positive utility).
Preference utilitarianism (also known as preferentialism) is a form of utilitarianism in contemporary philosophy.Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2011, p. 14 It is distinct from original utilitarianism in that it values actions that fulfill the greatest amount of personal interests, as opposed to actions that generate the greatest amount of pleasure.
Mill's Utilitarianism remains "the most famous defense of the utilitarian view ever written"Scarre, Utilitarianism, p. 82. and is still widely assigned in university ethics courses around the world. Largely owing to Mill, utilitarianism rapidly became the dominant ethical theory in Anglo- American philosophy.J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy.
Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (Project Gutenberg online edition) Utilitarianism is the paradigmatic example of a consequentialist moral theory. This form of utilitarianism holds that the morally correct action is the one that produces the best outcome for all people affected by the action. John Stuart Mill, in his exposition of utilitarianism, proposed a hierarchy of pleasures, meaning that the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure is more highly valued than the pursuit of other pleasures. Other noteworthy proponents of utilitarianism are neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of, amongst other works, Practical Ethics.
In Bunge's sense, negative utilitarianism is about not harming.: "By recommending passivity it [negative utilitarianism] condones evil. The spectator who watches impassively a hooligan attacking an old woman, and the citizen who does not bother to vote, comply with negative utilitarianism and thereby tolerate evil." In contrast, most other discussion of negative utilitarianism takes it to imply a duty both not to harm and to help (at least in the sense of reducing negative well-being).
Sinnott- Armstrong, Walter. 'Consequentialism', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Accessed 24-7-07, Chapter 1. There are similarities with preference utilitarianism, where utility is defined as individual preference rather than pleasure. The two predecessor theories to two-level utilitarianism, act and rule utilitarianism, were beset by various objections.
John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. His conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. Mill also continued Bentham's tradition of advancing and defending utilitarianism. Mill's book Utilitarianism is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism.
In part four of Reasons and Persons, Parfit discusses possible futures for the world. Parfit discusses possible futures and population growth in Chapter 17 of Reasons and Persons. He shows that both average and total utilitarianism result in unwelcome conclusions when applied to population. In the section titled "Overpopulation," Parfit distinguishes between average utilitarianism and total utilitarianism.
A century and a half later, critic Roy Park acclaimed "Hazlitt's criticism of Bentham and Utilitarianism" here and in other essays as constituting "the first sustained critique of dogmatic Utilitarianism."Park 1971, p. 75.
Average utilitarianism values the maximization of the average utility among a group's members.Average Utilitarianism requires subscription So a group of 100 people each with 100 hedons (or "happiness points") is judged as preferable to a group of 1000 people with 99 hedons each. More counter intuitively still, average utilitarianism evaluates the existence of a single person with 100 hedons more favorably than an outcome in which a million people have an average utility of 99 hedons. Average utilitarianism may lead to repugnant conclusions if practiced strictly.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Parker, Son and Bourn, 1863), page 26. Mill further claims that scrutiny of motives will reveal a man's character, but utilitarianism does not judge character, only the rightness or wrongness of actions.
Other contemporary forms of utilitarianism mirror the forms of consequentialism outlined below.
This is an incomplete list of advocates of utilitarianism and/or consequentialism.
Total utilitarianism is a method of applying utilitarianism to a group to work out what the best set of outcomes would be. It assumes that the target utility is the maximum utility across the population based on adding all the separate utilities of each individual together. The main problem for total utilitarianism is the "mere addition paradox", which argues that a likely outcome of following total utilitarianism is a future where there is a large number of people with very low utility values. Parfit terms this "the repugnant conclusion", believing it to be intuitively undesirable.
Historically, hedonistic utilitarianism is the paradigmatic example of a consequentialist moral theory. This form of utilitarianism holds that what matters is the aggregate happiness; the happiness of everyone, and not the happiness of any particular person. John Stuart Mill, in his exposition of hedonistic utilitarianism, proposed a hierarchy of pleasures, meaning that the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure is more highly valued than the pursuit of other pleasures. However, some contemporary utilitarians, such as Peter Singer, are concerned with maximizing the satisfaction of preferences, hence preference utilitarianism.
Thus, contrary to what most ethicists have believed, there is no fundamental clash between intuitionism and utilitarianism. The problem lies with squaring utilitarianism with egoism. Sidgwick believes that the basic principles of egoism (“Pursue your own greatest happiness”) and utilitarianism (“Promote the general happiness”) are both self-evident. Like many previous moralists, he argues that self-interest and morality coincide in the great majority of cases.
In 19th century Britain, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill advocated utilitarianism, the view that right actions are those that are likely to result in the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Utilitarianism remains popular in the twenty-first century.E.g. P. Singer, Practical Ethics (2nd ed, Cambridge, 1993). Both Kantianism and Utilitarianism provide ethical theories that can support contemporary liberal political developments, and associated enlightenment ways of conceiving of the individual.
Smart, R. N. (1958) "Negative utilitarianism", Mind, 67, pp. 542-543.Sikora, R. I. (1976) "Negative utilitarianism: Not dead yet", Mind, 85, pp. 587-588. This term continues to be used in naming positions such as negative consequentialism, negative prioritarianism or negative utilitarianism. However, the use of the term "suffering-focused ethics" has increased during the 21st century, as it informs more directly and clearly about the view it denotes.
And were it true, it would take us too far, generating not only anti-natalism but straightaway also its pro-mortalist neighbour." and Ingmar Persson.: “negative utilitarianism seems implausible, as is shown by an argument sketched by McMahan, on the basis of an argument originally put forward by Richard Sikora (1978). This argument turns on the observation that if what would be bad for individuals in life is a reason against conceiving them, but what would be good for them is no reason in favour of conceiving them, then, as far as those individuals are concerned, it is wrong to conceive them, however much good their lives will contain, provided that they will also contain something that is bad for them. This seems clearly absurd.” On the other hand, Joseph Mendola develops a modification of utilitarianism, and he says that his principle Professor Henry Hiz writes favorably of negative utilitarianism.: "Utilitarianism failed, but what is sometimes called ‘negative utilitarianism’ avoids many of the shortcomings of classical utilitarianism.
Philosophical ethics: an introduction to moral philosophy, (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw Hill, 130. Traditional utilitarianism (act utilitarianism) treats this as a claim that people should try to ensure that their actions maximize overall happiness or pleasure.Mill, John Stuart. (1863). ‘Chapter 1’.
They are based on consequentialist theories such as utilitarianism. Consequentialism is sometimes confused with utilitarianism, but utilitarianism is only one member of a broad family of consequentialist theories. Consequentialist theories usually maintain that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on whether the results of the action are desirable. They are frequently contrasted to deontological theories of morality, which typically hold that certain actions are either forbidden or wrong per se.
Unlike Classical Utilitarianism, positive experiences such as pleasure or happiness are either given no weight, or at least a lot less weight.” Other versions of negative utilitarianism differ in how much weight they give to negative well-being ('disutility') compared to positive well-being (positive utility), as well as the different conceptions of what well-being (utility) is. For example, negative preference utilitarianism says that the well-being in an outcome depends on frustrated preferences.
Act utilitarianism not only requires everyone to do what they can to maximize utility, but to do so without any favouritism. Mill said, "As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator." Critics say that this combination of requirements leads to utilitarianism making unreasonable demands. The well-being of strangers counts just as much as that of friends, family or self.
Simmons, H. J. 1986. "The quantification of 'happinenss' in utilitarianism" (Ph.D. thesis). Hamilton, ON: McMaster University.
Scarre, Utilitarianism, p. 97; G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903, p. 67.
Sidgwick summarizes his position in ethics as utilitarianism “on an Intuitional basis”. This reflects, and disputes, the rivalry then felt among British philosophers between the philosophies of utilitarianism and ethical intuitionism, which is illustrated, for example, by John Stuart Mill’s criticism of ethical intuitionism in the first chapter of his book Utilitarianism. Sidgwick developed this position due to his dissatisfaction with an inconsistency in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, between what he labels “psychological hedonism” and “ethical hedonism”. Psychological hedonism states that everyone always will do what is in their self interest, whereas ethical hedonism states that everyone ought to do what is in the general interest.
Utilitarianism was most prominently defended by British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Though there are many varieties of utilitarianism, generally it is the view that a morally right action is an action that produces the maximum good for people.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/ "History of Utilitarianism" Utilitarianism has often been used when deciding how to use land and it is closely connected with an economic- based ethic. For example, it forms the foundation for industrial farming; an increase in yield, which would increase the number of people able to receive goods from farmed land, is judged from this view to be a good action or approach.
Mill was brought up as a Benthamite with the explicit intention that he would carry on the cause of utilitarianism. Mill's book Utilitarianism first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and was reprinted as a single book in 1863.
" The most commonly discussed subtypes are probably two versions of weak negative utilitarianism called 'lexical' and 'lexical threshold' negative utilitarianism. According to 'lexical' negative utilitarianism, positive utility gets weight only when outcomes are equal with respect to disutility. That is, positive utility functions as a tiebreaker in that it determines which outcome is better (or less bad) when the outcomes considered have equal disutility.: "The claim that disutility has greater weight can now be expressed by letting the disutilities have greater lexical weight.
Chapter three considers utilitarianism, according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the extent to which it promotes utility—a concept equated, by classical utilitarians, with pleasure. As a political theory, then, classical utilitarianism entails that "it is the obligation of political communities to formulate policies and institutions which promote pleasure".Cochrane 2010, pp. 29–30. Utilitarianism as a whole, Cochrane argues, posed a challenge to the medieval and early modern assumption that animals are owed nothing.
Smart, J. J. C., and Bernard Williams. 1973. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press. pp. 98 ff.
He is also known for his defense of utilitarianism, writing in response to Bernard Williams's criticism of it.
Smart's views on rule utilitarianism have been challenged, for example by Alan Gibbard Another aspect of Smart's ethical theory is his acceptance of a preference theory of well-being, which contrasts with the hedonism associated with "classical" utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham. Smart's combination of the preference theory with consequentialism is sometimes called "preference utilitarianism". Smart's arguments against rule utilitarianism have been very influential, contributing to a steady decline in its popularity among ethicists during the late 20th century. Worldwide, his defence of act utilitarianism and preference theory has been less prominent but has influenced philosophers who have worked or been educated in Australia, such as Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Peter Singer.
Various philosophical approaches to utilitarianism and hedonism advocate maximizing the amount of pleasure and minimizing the amount of suffering.
Nevertheless, whether they would agree or not, this is what critics of utilitarianism claim is entailed by the theory.
John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism is a classic exposition and defence of utilitarianism in ethics. The essay first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 (vol. 64, p. 391–406, 525–534, 659–673); the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863.
That is why graded absolutism is also called the 'greater good view', but is not to be confused with utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism in On Liberty and Other Essays ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Chapter 5.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is well known for beginning the tradition of classical utilitarianism in Britain. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory of normative ethics which holds that an act is morally right if and only if that act maximizes happiness or pleasure. Classical utilitarianism is said to be hedonistic because it regards pleasure as the only intrinsic good and pain as the only intrinsic evil."Consequentialism" at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved April 10, 2011 Utilitarianism was described by Bentham as "the greatest happiness or greatest felicity principle".AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION, Jeremy Bentham, 1789 (“printed” in 1780, “first published” in 1789, "corrected by the Author" in 1823.) See Chapter I: Of the Principle of Utility.
He may be regarded as the founder of English utilitarianism. His utilitarianism is distinct from the individualism of some later utilitarians; it goes to the contrary extreme, by almost absorbing individual in universal good. To the question, "What is the foundation of rectitude?," he replies, the greatest good of the universe of rational beings.
A part of Clark Wolf's response to the benevolent world-exploder objection is that negative utilitarianism can be combined with a theory of rights. He says: Negative utilitarianism can be combined, in particular, with Rawls' theory of justice. Rawls knew Popper's normative claims and may have been influenced by his concern for the worst-off.
In ethics, Norcross defends a version of act utilitarianism known as scalar utilitarianism, which is the theory that there are no right or wrong actions, only better or worse actions ranked along a continuum from the action (or actions) that contributes most to overall utility to the action (or actions) that contributes the least.
Creating a less-than-average life would become an immoral act. Furthermore, in a world where everyone was experiencing very bad lives that were not worth living, adding more people whose lives were also not worth living, but were less unpleasant than the lives of those who already existed, would raise the average, and appear to be a moral duty. The hazards of average utilitarianism are potentially avoided if it is applied more pragmatically. For instance, the practical application of rule utilitarianism (or else two-level utilitarianism) may temper the aforementioned undesirable conclusions.
Brandt wrote Ethical Theory (1959), an influential textbook in the field. He defended a version of rule utilitarianism in "Toward a credible form of utilitarianism" (1963) and performed cultural- anthropological studies in Hopi Ethics (1954). In A Theory of the Good and the Right, Brandt proposed a "reforming definition" of rationality, that one is rational if one's preferences are such that they survive cognitive psychotherapy in terms of all relevant information and logical criticism. He argued also that the morality such rational persons would accept would be a form of utilitarianism.
The canonical statement of Mill's utilitarianism can be found in his book, Utilitarianism. Although this philosophy has a long tradition, Mill's account is primarily influenced by Jeremy Bentham and Mill's father James Mill. John Stuart Mill believed in the philosophy of utilitarianism, which he would describe as the principle that holds "that actions are right in the proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness". By happiness he means, "intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure".
New Zealand's largest building was an exercise in Gothic Revival architecture, but its facades belied the utilitarianism of its repetitious interior.
Häyry, Matti, Critical studies in philosophical medical ethics. University of Helsinki 1990. Häyry, Matti, Liberal utilitarianism and applied ethics. Routledge 1994.
On Liberty is a philosophical essay by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Published in 1859, it applies Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state. Mill suggests standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality, which he considers prerequisite to the higher pleasures—the summum bonum of utilitarianism.
A critic of utilitarianism, in Innocence and Consequentialism she argued in 1996 that utilitarianism has insufficient conceptual apparatus to comprehend the very idea of innocence, a feature central to any comprehensive ethical theory.Laing, Jacqueline A. (1997), "Innocence and Consequentialism" in Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics, eds. J. A. Laing with D. S. Oderberg. London, Macmillan, pp.
Rodó denounced pragmatic utilitarianism, i.e. the philosophical movement that considered utility as the way to bring the most happiness to all those affected by it: “the name Ariel means the affirming of an idealist sense of life against the limitations of utilitarianism”.Quoted in G Brotherton, ‘’Arielismo’’ in P Hulme ed., The Tempest and Its Travels (London 2000) p.
A critic of utilitarianism, in Innocence and Consequentialism (1996), Jacqueline Laing argues that utilitarianism has insufficient conceptual apparatus to comprehend the very idea of innocence, a feature central to any comprehensive ethical theory.Laing, Jacqueline A. (1997), "Innocence and Consequentialism" in Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics, eds. J. A. Laing with D. S. Oderberg. London, Macmillan, pp.
Audi, Robert. 2007. "Can Utilitarianism Be Distributive? Maximization and Distribution as Criteria in Managerial Decisions." Business Ethics Quarterly 17(4):593–611.
University of Chicago Press. p. 383. . Peter Leeson and Ludwig von Mises.Younkins, Edward W. (July 6, 2002). "Mises' Utilitarianism as Social Cooperation".
While the basic notion that utilitarianism builds on seems simple, one major dispute within the school of utilitarianism revolved around the conceptualisation and measurement of welfare. With disputes over this fundamental aspect, utilitarianism is evidently a broad term embracing many different sub-theories under its umbrella, and while much of the theoretical framework transects across these conceptualisations, using the different conceptualisation have clear implications for how we understand the more practical side of utilitarianism in distributive justice. Bentham originally conceptualised this according to the hedonistic calculus, which also became the foundation for John Stuart Mill's focus on intellectual pleasures as the most beneficial contribution to societal welfare. Another path has been painted by Aristotle, based on an attempt to create a more universal list of conditions required for human prosperity.
Many forms of universalism, such as utilitarianism, are non-absolutist. Other forms such as those theorized by Isaiah Berlin, may value pluralist ideals.
According to the first, rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism because there is no adequate criterion on what can count as a "rule". According to the second, even if there were such a criterion, the rule utilitarian would be committed to the untenable position of preferring to follow a rule, even if it would be better if the rule were broken, which Smart called "superstitious rule worship".J.J.C. Smart, "Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism", The Philosophical Quarterly, Oct. 1956, pages 344–354, based on a paper read to the Victorian Branch of the Australasian Association of Psychology and philosophy, Oct. 1955.
Strong rule utilitarianism (SRU) gives a utilitarian account for the claim that moral rules should be obeyed at all places and times. SRU does not deteriorate into act utilitarianism like weak rule utilitarianism, but it shares weaknesses with similarly absolutist moral stances (notably, deontological ones). A scenario (or thought experiment) used to clarify this problem (often attributed to Immanuel Kant) posits both # you know the location of some persons # a murderer asks you about their location in order to go and kill them. The moral convention is that lying is wrong, so the strong rule utilitarian says you should reveal their location.
Sidgwick is closely, and controversially, associated with esoteric morality: the position that a moral system (such as utiltiarianism) may be acceptable, but that it is not acceptable for that moral system to be widely taught or accepted. Bernard Williams would refer to Sidgwickian esoteric utilitarianism as "Government House Utilitarianism" and claim that it reflects the elite British colonialist setting of Sidgwick's thought.
This would also allow average utilitarianism to acknowledge the general human preference for life. Average utilitarianism is treated as being so obvious that it does not need any explanation in Garrett Hardin's essay The Tragedy of the Commons,Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons" (section "What shall we maximize?"), Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.
Next, he talks about how morality is the basic way to achieve happiness. He also discusses in this chapter that Utilitarianism is beneficial for virtue. He says that "it maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself." In his final chapter he looks at the connection between Utilitarianism and justice.
Lacking a sense of higher values Western societies are left with pluralism, moral relativism and utilitarianism, and for Schumacher the inevitable result is chaos.
Mill was the father of John Stuart Mill, a noted philosopher of liberalism and utilitarianism, and a colonial administrator at the East India Company.
The utility monster is a thought experiment in the study of ethics created by philosopher Robert Nozick in 1974 as a criticism of utilitarianism.
Mill separated his explanation of Utilitarianism into five different sections: # General Remarks; # What Utilitarianism Is; # Of the Ultimate Sanction of the Principle of Utility; # Of What Sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is Susceptible; # and Of the Connection between Justice and Utility. In the General Remarks portion of his essay he speaks how next to no progress has been made when it comes to judging what is right and what is wrong of morality and if there is such a thing as moral instinct (which he argues that there may not be). However, he agrees that in general "Our moral faculty, according to all those of its interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgments". In What Utilitarianism Is, he focuses no longer on background information but utilitarianism itself.
Jeremy Bentham developed hedonistic utilitarianism, a popular doctrine in ethics, politics, and economics. Bentham argued that the right act or policy was that which would cause "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". He suggested a procedure called hedonic or felicific calculus, for determining how much pleasure and pain would result from any action. John Stuart Mill improved and promoted the doctrine of hedonistic utilitarianism.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 198–216. In utilitarianism, an act can only be better because it would bring more good to a greater number, and in that case it becomes a duty, not a supererogatory act. The lack of a notion of supererogation in utilitarianism and related schools leads to the demandingness objection, arguing that these schools are too ethically demanding, requiring unreasonable acts.
An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory is the first book by Alasdair Cochrane. An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory begins by discussing the history of animals in political theory before considering the approaches taken to the status of animals by five schools of political theory: utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism and feminism. The final chapter outlines Cochrane's own approach, which he situates between liberalism and utilitarianism.
To understand how act utilitarianism works, compare the consequences of watching television all day tomorrow to the consequences of doing charity work tomorrow. One could produce more overall happiness in the world by doing charity work tomorrow than by watching television all day tomorrow. According to act utilitarianism, then, the right thing to do tomorrow is to go out and do charity work; it is wrong to stay home and watch television all day. Act utilitarianism is based on the principle of utility, which is the basis of all utilitarian theories and is best summed up in Bentham's well-known phrase, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".
We believe that literary chimeras have a special reality. We do not want utilitarianism. We do not write for propaganda. Art is real, like life itself.
It was already accepted that it is necessary to use rules to help you choose the right action because the problems of calculating the consequences on each and every occasion would almost certainly result in you frequently choosing something less than the best course of action. Paley had justified the use of rules and Mill says: However, rule utilitarianism proposes a more central role for rules that was thought to rescue the theory from some of its more devastating criticisms, particularly problems to do with justice and promise keeping. Smart (1956) and McCloskey (1957) initially use the terms extreme and restricted utilitarianism but eventually everyone settled on the prefixes act and rule instead. Likewise, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, articles were published both for and against the new form of utilitarianism, and through this debate the theory we now call rule utilitarianism was created.
For someone who believes that consequentialism in general is true, yet is uncertain between classical and negative utilitarianism, the world destruction argument is not fatal to negative utilitarianism if there are similar hypothetical scenarios in which a classical utilitarian (but not a negative utilitarian) would be obligated to destroy the world in order to replace those killed by new individuals. Simon Knutsson writes: > There are scenarios in which traditional utilitarianism, but not negative > utilitarianism, implies that it would be right to kill everyone, namely, > scenarios in which the killing would increase both positive and negative > well-being and result in a greater sum of positive minus negative well- > being. Negative utilitarianism does not imply that it would be right to kill > everyone in such scenarios because, in these scenarios, killing everyone > would increase negative well-being. An example of such a scenario is that > all humans or all sentient beings on Earth could be killed and replaced with > many more beings who, collectively, experience both more positive well-being > and more negative well-being, but with a greater sum of positive minus > negative well-being.
He is particularly well known for his interpretation of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, arguing that Mill's utilitarianism is compatible with recognizing the importance of rights.
In the mid-20th century, a number of philosophers focused on the place of rules in utilitarian thought.Bayles, M. D., ed. 1968. Contemporary Utilitarianism. Doubleday: Anchor Books.
The distinctions drawn in Part II are logically independent of any commitment to utilitarianism, Harean or otherwise. In Part III, Varner explores the replaceability argument (the idea that it would be ethically acceptable to painlessly kill beings if it was immediately replaced with a new equally happy being) in the context of two-level utilitarianism. At the critical level, he argues that both humans and animals are replaceable.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. His particular brand of utilitarianism indicated that the most moral action is that which causes the highest amount of utility, where defined utility as the aggregate pleasure after deducting suffering of all involved in any action. Happiness, therefore, is the experience of pleasure and the lack of pain.
1 Sidgwick considers three such procedures, namely, rational egoism, dogmatic intuitionism, and utilitarianism. Rational egoism is the view that, if rational, "an agent regards quantity of consequent pleasure and pain to himself alone important in choosing between alternatives of action; and seeks always the greatest attainable surplus of pleasure over pain".Sidgwick (1907), p. 95 Sidgwick found it difficult to find any persuasive reason for preferring rational egoism over utilitarianism.
OCR Religious Ethics for AS and A2. Routledge. However, it is not clear that this distinction is made in the academic literature. It has been argued that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism, because for any given rule, in the case where breaking the rule produces more utility, the rule can be refined by the addition of a sub-rule that handles cases like the exception.Lyons, David. 1965.
The objection that "utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons" came to prominence in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. The concept is also important in animal rights advocate Richard Ryder's rejection of utilitarianism, in which he talks of the "boundary of the individual," through which neither pain nor pleasure may pass.Ryder, Richard D. Painism: A Modern Morality. Centaur Press, 2001. pp.
73, no. 3, 2006, pp. 619–645. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40041013. Accessed 18 February 2020. Nozick outlined the “utility monster” thought experiment as an attempted criticism to utilitarianism.
Classical theories in this vein include utilitarianism, Kantianism, and some forms of contractarianism. These theories mainly offered the use of overarching moral principles to resolve difficult moral decisions.
Apart from the criticisms that are commonly made of utilitarianism in general, there are several criticisms made specifically against two-level utilitarianism. One objection is that two-level utilitarianism undermines an agent's commitment to act in accordance with his or her moral principles. For example, a theist will comply with his/her moral code because he/she sees it as based upon God's will. However, a two-level utilitarian knows that his everyday set of moral rules is merely a guideline, and as such any breach of these rules is unlikely to accompany the same degree of guilt as would someone who believed that it was wrong in principle to act in that way.
Utilitarianism provided the political justification for implementation of economic liberalism by British governments, which was to dominate economic policy from the 1830s. Although utilitarianism prompted legislative and administrative reform and John Stuart Mill's later writings on the subject foreshadowed the welfare state, it was mainly used as a justification for laissez-faire. The central concept of utilitarianism, which was developed by Jeremy Bentham, was that public policy should seek to provide "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". While this could be interpreted as a justification for state action to reduce poverty, it was used by classical liberals to justify inaction with the argument that the net benefit to all individuals would be higher.
Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that we should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the total amount of happiness. It can be considered as a version of utilitarianism that gives greater priority to reducing suffering (negative utility or 'disutility') than to increasing pleasure (positive utility).For example, : "'Negative utilitarianism' is concerned mainly or entirely with reducing evils rather than with maximizing goods." The example unpleasant experiences is an example based on a hedonistic theory of well- being, according to which pleasant experiences are good for individuals and unpleasant experiences are bad for individuals.
" The position stands in contrast to classical utilitarianism, among other ethical theories, which holds that creating "satisfied preferrers" is, or can be, a good in itself. Antifrustrationism has similarities with, although it is different from, negative utilitarianism, the teachings of Buddha, Stoicism, philosophical pessimism, and Schopenhauer's philosophy.: "An outline of the ancestors and near and distant relatives of antifrustrationism will have to wait another occasion. (See, however, the sources listed in notes 2 and 21.) It is instructive, for example, to compare the doctrine of the relevant teachings of Buddha, the Stoics, Schopenhauer, or Albert Ellis, to Seana Shiffrin’s recent work, to pessimism (in the various meanings of that word), and to what has become known as ‘negative utilitarianism’.
He also questions the call for utilitarianism in education and the value of educational research. In this book, Egan provides examples and logic based arguments which counter these ideas.
Because it avoids pitfalls associated with other dominant ethical theoretical approaches (such as deontology, utilitarianism, contractarianism, and virtue ethics), Gert's moral theory "provides what many people are looking for".
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 174. Though some contemporary ethicists would not agree with all elements of Mill's moral philosophy, utilitarianism remains a live option in ethical theory today.
By taking this stand we revealed ourselves as members of the negative utilitarian family.” : “NU [negative utilitarianism] comes in several flavours, which I will outline later, but the basic thrust is that an act is morally right if and only if it leads to less suffering than any available alternative. Unlike Classical Utilitarianism, positive experiences such as pleasure or happiness are either given no weight, or at least a lot less weight.
It reached breaking point in 1970 when Williams formed a relationship with Patricia Law Skinner, a commissioning editor for Cambridge University Press and wife of the historian Quentin Skinner.Mike Peel, Shirley Williams: The Biography, London: Biteback Publishing, 2013, 157. She had approached Williams to write the opposing view of utilitarianism for Utilitarianism: For and Against with J. J. C. Smart (1973), and they had fallen in love. Williams and Skinner began living together in 1971.
To Cobden and many classical liberals, those who advocated peace must also advocate free markets. Utilitarianism was seen as a political justification for the implementation of economic liberalism by British governments, an idea dominating economic policy from the 1840s. Although utilitarianism prompted legislative and administrative reform and John Stuart Mill's later writings on the subject foreshadowed the welfare state, it was mainly used as a premise for a laissez-faire approach.Richardson, p.
Benthamism, the utilitarian philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham, was substantially modified by his successor John Stuart Mill, who popularized the term utilitarianism. In 1861, Mill acknowledged in a footnote that, though Bentham believed "himself to be the first person who brought the word 'utilitarian' into use, he did not invent it. Rather, he adopted it from a passing expression" in John Galt's 1821 novel Annals of the Parish.Mill, John Stuart. 1861. Utilitarianism. n1.
In book format, Jonathan Leighton has defended 'negative utilitarianism plus', which holds the reduction of suffering to be of highest importance, while also valuing the continued existence of sentient beings.
This theory opposes utilitarianism in the sense that instead of concerning itself with the consequence, it focuses on the duty. However, both are fundamental theories that contribute to animal ethics.
Prichard attacks Utilitarianism as not being capable of forming obligation. He states that one cannot justify an obligation by pointing to the consequences of the obligated action because pointing to the consequences only shows that the action is desirable or advisable, not that it is obligatory. In other words, he claims that, while Utilitarianism may encourage people to do actions which a moral person would do, it cannot create a moral obligation to do those actions.
For this reason, utilitarianism is often associated with the term welfarist consequentialism. In utilitarianism it is the "end result" which is fundamental (as opposed to Kantian ethics discussed above). Thus using the same scenario as above, it would be irrelevant whether the person giving money to charity was doing so out of personal or religious conviction, the mere fact that the charitable donation is being made is sufficient for it to be classified as morally good.
Simple act utilitarianism would favour Jim killing one of the men.J. J. C. Smart, Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, 98–99. Williams argued that there is a crucial distinction between a person being killed by Jim, and being killed by the captain because of an act or omission of Jim's. The captain, if he chooses to kill, is not simply the medium of an effect Jim is having on the world.
He claims that two methods—intuitionism and utilitarianism—can be fully harmonized. Though most of the moral principles intuitionists often claim are “self-evident” are not actually so, there are a handful of genuinely clear and indubitable moral axioms. These, Sidgwick claims, turn out to be fully compatible with utilitarianism, and in fact are necessary to provide a rational basis for utilitarian theory. Moreover, Sidgwick argues, intuitionism in its most defensible form is saturated with latent utilitarian presuppositions.
Woolwine asserts that utilitarianism and rights discourse need to be replaced by a synthesis of modern and post-modern philosophy to coherently and soundly justify the principles of the Library Bill of Rights.
Because utilitarianism is not a single theory, but rather a cluster of related theories that have been developed over two hundred years, criticisms can be made for different reasons and have different targets.
Utilitarianism is a type of consequentialist ethical theory. According to such theories, only the outcome of an action is morally relevant (this contrasts with deontology, according to which moral actions flow from duties or motives). Utilitarianism is a combination of consequentialism and the philosophical position hedonism, which states that pleasure, or happiness, is the only good worth pursuing. Therefore, since only the consequences of an action matter, and only happiness matters, only happiness that is the consequence of an action is morally relevant.
Ethical egoism was introduced by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in his book The Methods of Ethics, written in 1874. Sidgwick compared egoism to the philosophy of utilitarianism, writing that whereas utilitarianism sought to maximize overall pleasure, egoism focused only on maximizing individual pleasure. Philosophers before Sidgwick have also retroactively been identified as ethical egoists. One ancient example is the philosophy of Yang Zhu (4th century BC), Yangism, who views wei wo, or "everything for myself", as the only virtue necessary for self- cultivation.
The description of ideal utilitarianism was first used by Hastings Rashdall in The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), but it is more often associated with G. E. Moore. In Ethics (1912), Moore rejects a purely hedonistic utilitarianism and argues that there is a range of values that might be maximized. Moore's strategy was to show that it is intuitively implausible that pleasure is the sole measure of what is good. He says that such an assumption:Moore, G. E. (1912).
Others distinguish between 'strong' and 'weak' versions of negative utilitarianism, where strong versions are only concerned with reducing negative well-being, and weak versions say that both positive and negative well-being matter but that negative well-being matters more. says that strong versions of negative utilitarianism "give all weight to disutility" and weak versions "give some weight to positive utility, but more weight to disutility." : “Our point of departure was the firm intuition that unhappiness and suffering have greater weight than happiness. By taking this stand we revealed ourselves as members of the negative utilitarian family.” : “NU [negative utilitarianism] comes in several flavours, which I will outline later, but the basic thrust is that an act is morally right if and only if it leads to less suffering than any available alternative.
Egoism and altruism both contrast with ethical utilitarianism, which holds that a moral agent should treat one's self (also known as the subject) with no higher regard than one has for others (as egoism does, by elevating self-interests and "the self" to a status not granted to others). But it also holds that one is not obligated to sacrifice one's own interests (as altruism does) to help others' interests, so long as one's own interests (i.e. one's own desires or well-being) are substantially equivalent to the others' interests and well-being, but he has the choice to do so. Egoism, utilitarianism, and altruism are all forms of consequentialism, but egoism and altruism contrast with utilitarianism, in that egoism and altruism are both agent-focused forms of consequentialism (i.e.
He supported the theory of utilitarianism, which is still a controversial but highly regarded foundation for animal research. The theory of utilitarianism states that "an action is right if and only if it produces a better balance of benefits and harms than available alternative actions", thus, this theory determines whether or not something is right by weighing the pleasure against the suffering of the result. It is not concerned with the process, only the weight of the consequence against the process, and while the consequentialism theory suggests if an action is bad or good, utilitarianism only focuses on the benefit of the outcome. While this may be able to be applied to some animal research and raising for food, there are many flaws that have been exposed in this theory.
The moral guide must then promote and encourage social behaviors that maximize general benefit. As motivation for his theory, Mozi brought in the Will of Heaven, but rather than being religious his philosophy parallels utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism as a distinct ethical position only emerged in the 18th century, and although it is usually thought to have begun with Jeremy Bentham, there were earlier writers who presented theories that were strikingly similar.
He formulates average utilitarianism in two ways. One is what Parfit calls the "Impersonal Average Principle", which he formulates as "If other things are equal, the best outcome is the one in which people's lives go, on average, best." The other is what he calls the "Hedonistic version"; he formulates this as "If other things are equal, the best outcome is the one in which there is the greatest average net sum of happiness, per life lived." Parfit then gives two formulations of the total utilitarianism view.
His major sociological work was interested in differentiating Avrupalılık ("Europeanism", the mimicking of Western societies) and Modernlik ("Modernity", taking initiative); he was interested in Japan as a model in this, for what he perceived to be its having modernized without abandoning its innate cultural identity. Gökalp suggested that to subordinate "culture" (non- utilitarianism, altruism, public-spiritedness) to "civilization" (utilitarianism, egoism, individualism) was to doom a state to decline: "civilization destroyed societal solidarity and morality".Parla, Taha. The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp. 1980, page 31.
Contemporary proponents of hedonism include Swedish philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö,Torbjörn Tännsjö; Hedonistic Utilitarianism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1998). Fred Feldman,Fred Feldman(2006). Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism.
Consequentalist libertarians include Milton Friedman,"Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 1 of 4)". YouTube. Retrieved 22 January 2020. David D. Friedman, Peter Leeson, Ludwig von Mises,Younkins, Edward W. (6 July 2002). Mises' Utilitarianism as Social Cooperation.
9th ed. Boston, Massaschussetts, USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009 Pp. 760. In particular, fascism opposes liberalism for its materialism, rationalism, individualism and utilitarianism. Fascists believe that the liberal emphasis on individual freedom produces national divisiveness.
Some argue that it is impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because consequences are inherently unknowable. Daniel Dennett describes this as the Three Mile Island effect.Dennett, Daniel (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster, p. 498 .
Hare's philosophy of two-level utilitarianism has been a focus of Varner's since the early 2000s, and was the subject of his Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition. In the book, Varner breaks with his previous biocentrism, instead endorsing sentientism (the idea that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability), prescriptivism, and two-level utilitarianism.Attfield and Humphreys 2012, p. 493. The book is split into three parts: "Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism", "Persons, Near-Persons, and the Merely Sentient", and "Formulating ILS [Intuitive-Level System] Rules for Persons, Near-Persons, and the Merely Sentient".
For example, rule utilitarianism was criticized for implying that in some cases an individual should pursue a course of action that would obviously not maximise utility. Conversely, act utilitarianism was criticized for not allowing for a 'human element' in its calculations, i.e. it is sometimes too difficult (or impossible) for an ordinary person. As a descriptive model of the two levels, Hare posited two extreme cases of people, one of whom would only use critical moral thinking and the other of whom would only use intuitive moral thinking.
The demandingness objection is a common argument raised against utilitarianism and other consequentialist ethical theories. The consequentialist requirement that we maximize the good impartially seems to this objection to require us to perform acts that we would normally consider optional. For example, if our resources maximize utility through charitable contributions rather than spending them on ourselves, we are, according to utilitarianism, morally required to do so. The objection holds that this clashes with our intuitions about morality, since we would normally consider such acts to be "supererogatory" (praiseworthy but not obligatory).
Mill believed law should create happiness Utilitarianism is the view that the laws should be crafted so as to produce the best consequences for the greatest number of people. Historically, utilitarian thinking about law has been associated with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill was a pupil of Bentham's and was the torch bearer for utilitarian philosophy throughout the late nineteenth century.see, Utilitarianism at Metalibri Digital Library In contemporary legal theory, the utilitarian approach is frequently championed by scholars who work in the law and economics tradition.
Acton also endorsed a version of negative utilitarianism, according to which the reduction of suffering has unique moral importance.Acton, Henry Burrows, “Negative Utilitarianism,” with John William Nevill Watkins, Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 1963, Volume 37:1, pp. 83-114. He had teaching positions at the London School of Economics, Bedford College, the University of Edinburgh where he occupied the Chair of Moral Philosophy, and the University of Chicago. He was editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, of which he was for a time Director.
Proportionalism is an ethical theory that lies between consequential theories and deontological theories.Note that there is a substantial difference between teleology, as it is understood in the Thomistic context, and consequentialism. See Consequential theories, like utilitarianism, say that an action is right or wrong, depending on the consequences it produces, but deontological theories, such as Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, say that actions are either intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong. Proportionalist theories like rule utilitarianism, however, say that it is never right to go against a principle unless a proportionate reason would justify it.
Although utilitarianism prompted legislative and administrative reform and Mill's later writings on the subject foreshadowed the welfare state, it was mainly used as a justification for laissez-faire.Richardson, p. 32 The central concept of utilitarianism which was developed by Jeremy Bentham was that public policy should seek to provide "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". While this could be interpreted as a justification for state action to reduce poverty, it was used by classical liberals to justify inaction with the argument that the net benefit to all individuals would be higher.
The book is also critical of the philosophy of utilitarianism, satirising the phrase "The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number." It is highly critical of eugenics throughout and somewhat conflates it with utilitarianism in suggesting that it would be a key feature in a society which took the philosophy as its central doctrine. Le Guin may have named her protagonist "George Orr" as an homage to British author George Orwell, as well as to draw comparisons between the dystopic worlds she describes in Lathe, and the dystopia Orwell envisioned in his novel 1984.
Mill's explicit theory of rights is introduced in Chapter V of Utilitarianism in the context of his sanction theory of duty, which is an indirect form of utilitarianism that identifies wrong actions as actions that it is useful to sanction. Mill then introduces justice as a proper part of duty. Justice involves duties that are perfect duties—that is, duties that are correlated with rights. Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as a matter of right.
This is the most famous argument against negative utilitarianism, and it is directed against sufficiently strong versions of negative utilitarianism.That is, the argument is directed against strong versions of negative utilitarainaism that prescribe only reducing negative well-being, as well as weak versions that are sufficiently close to strong negative utilitarianism. Such weak versions would be those that, although they give weight to both negative and positive well-being, give sufficiently much more the weight to negative well-being, so that they would have the same implications as strong versions in relevant situations.
In the 19th century, ethical intuitionism was considered by most British philosophers to be a philosophical rival of utilitarianism, until Henry Sidgwick showed there to be several logically distinct theories, both normative and epistemological, sharing the same label.Louden (1996), pp. 579–582 Sidgwick would furthermore argue that utilitarianism could be justified on the basis of a rational intuitionist epistemology. Inspired by this, 20th century philosopher C.D. Broad would coin the term "deontological ethics" to refer to the normative doctrines associated with intuitionism, leaving the phrase "ethical intuitionism" free to refer to the epistemological doctrines.
That is, can we accept that some individuals may harm some innocent in certain cases? (This non-aggression principle does not include, of course, self- defense and perhaps some other special cases he points out). He then goes on to expose some problems with utilitarianism by discussing whether animals should be taken into account in the utilitarian calculation of happiness, if that depends on the kind of animal, if killing them painlessly would be acceptable, and so on. He believes that utilitarianism is not appropriate even with animals.
Normative in their conception, Myers' works fundamentally examine ideas regarding the interconnectedness of creation and emphasize the importance of strong moral character as vital to the health and well-being of the world and society. Myers criticizes utilitarian views, especially "negative" utilitarianism, which holds that ethics require nothing more than the minimization of harm, and of deontological views, which emphasize social duties and adhering to social norms, i.e. rules. As an alternative to utilitarianism and deontology, Myers explores the ethics of character and identity, self-knowledge and shared life.
One of the oldest criticisms of utilitarianism is that it ignores our special obligations. For example, if we were given the choice between saving two random people or our mother, most would choose to save their mothers. According to utilitarianism, such a natural action is immoral. The first to respond to this was an early utilitarian and friend of Jeremy Bentham named William Godwin, who held in his work Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that such personal needs should be disregarded in favour of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Because binary choices are directly observable, it instantly appealed to economists. The search for observables in microeconomics is taken even further by revealed preference theory. Despite utilitarianism and decision theory, many economists have differing definitions of "rational agents".
The way Mill interpreted subjects over time changed. For many years Mill was seen as an inconsistent philosopher, writing on a number of separate issues. Consistency in his approach is based on utilitarianism, and the good of society.
Oxford University Press and (1997). Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert: Essays in Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press and Spanish ethic philosopher Esperanza Guisán (published a "Hedonist manifesto" in 1990). Dan Haybron has distinguished between psychological, ethical, welfare and axiological hedonism.
Neumann has taught at Trent University since 1975. He became a full professor in 2003. His interests at Trent University include ethics, political philosophy, formal logic, philosophy of logic, and metaphysics. He has published papers on utilitarianism and rationality.
How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time is a 2008 book by Iain King. It sets out a history of moral philosophy and presents new ideas in ethics, which have been described as quasi-utilitarianism.
These educational writings were among Priestley's most popular works. It was his metaphysical works, however, that had the most lasting influence, being considered primary sources for utilitarianism by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer.
Utilitarianism: For and Against by Bernard Williams. Cambridge > University Press, 1973. Peter L. Berger, in The Sacred Canopy, wrote: > Just as institutions may be relativized and thus humanized when viewed sub > specie aeternitatis, so may the roles representing these institutions.
In this book, Ahmed focuses on what it means to be worthy of happiness and how specific acts of deviation work with particular identities to cause unhappiness. She also focuses on how happiness is narrated and the idea of utilitarianism.
A common objection to utilitarianism is the inability to quantify, compare, or measure happiness or well-being. Ray Briggs writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Utility understood this way is a personal preference, in the absence of any objective measurement.
New York: Routledge. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
Arguably, the idea of hedonistic utilitarianism, where the ethical value of things is determined from the amount of subjective pleasure or pain they cause, is dependent on the existence of qualia.J. Shepherd, "Consciousness and Moral Status", Routledge Taylor & Francis group 2018.
1956, pages 344–354, based on a paper read to the Victorian Branch of the Australasian Association of Psychology and philosophy, Oct. 1955. Smart later stated that he made mistakes in this essay (for example, that probably maximizing benefit is not the same thing as maximizing probable benefit). However, perhaps because of this very fact, that is, perhaps because Smart did not fall prey to what might be called the "philosopher's disease" of attempting to be obsessively precise, this essay lays out a good clear, readable presentation of act utilitarianism. Smart gave two arguments against rule utilitarianism.
The contemporary discipline of sociology is theoretically multi-paradigmatic in line with the contentions of classical social theory. Randall Collins' well-cited survey of sociological theory retroactively labels various theorists as belonging to four theoretical traditions: Functionalism, Conflict, Symbolic Interactionism, and Utilitarianism. Accordingly, modern sociological theory predominantly descends from functionalist (Durkheim) and conflict (Marx and Weber) approaches to social structure, as well as from symbolic-interactionist approaches to social interaction, such as micro-level structural (Simmel) and pragmatist (Mead, Cooley) perspectives. Utilitarianism (aka rational choice or social exchange), although often associated with economics, is an established tradition within sociological theory.
Prioritarianism or the priority view is a view within ethics and political philosophy that holds that the goodness of an outcome is a function of overall well-being across all individuals with extra weight given to worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism resembles utilitarianism. Like utilitarianism, prioritarianism is a form of aggregative consequentialism; however, it differs in that it does not weight the well-being of all individuals equally, but instead prioritizes those individuals that are worse-off. The term "prioritarianism" was coined by the moral philosopher Larry Temkin in an effort to explicate the theory's non-egalitarian form.
The main theme of the tragicomedy is also the utilitarianism and its manifestation seen in the play. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory which distinguishes right from wrong with respect to outcomes. The school of thought believes that the most ethical choice is one which benefits the majority. In the context of the play the driving force behind the persecution and execution of Ill is solely on the basis that his death will lead to the town being lifted from the pits of poverty as Claire would donate the one billion Swiss francs promised, resulting in an increase in living standards and economic prosperity.
Jeremy Bentham The origins of utilitarianism can be traced back as far as Epicurus, but, as a school of thought, it is credited to Jeremy Bentham,Rosen, Frederick (2003). Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill. Routledge, p. 28. "It was Hume and Bentham who then reasserted most strongly the Epicurean doctrine concerning utility as the basis of justice." who found that "nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure"; then, from that moral insight, he derived the Rule of Utility: "that the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people".
Robert Nozick, a twentieth century American philosopher, coined the term "utility monster" in response to Jeremy Bentham's philosophy of utilitarianism. Nozick proposed that accepting the theory of utilitarianism causes the necessary acceptance of the condition that some people would use this to justify exploitation of others. An individual (or specific group) would claim their entitlement to more "happy units" than they claim others deserve, and the others would consequently be left to receive fewer "happy units". Nozick deems these exploiters "utility monsters" (and for ease of understanding, they might also be thought of as happiness hogs).
The United Kingdom is famous for the tradition of 'British Empiricism', a branch of the philosophy of knowledge that states that only knowledge verified by experience is valid, and 'Scottish Philosophy', sometimes referred to as the 'Scottish School of Common Sense'. The most famous philosophers of British Empiricism are John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume; while Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid and William Hamilton were major exponents of the Scottish "common sense" school. Two Britons are also notable for the ethical theory of utilitarianism, a moral philosophy first used by Jeremy Bentham and later by John Stuart Mill in his short work Utilitarianism.
The fifth and longest chapter concludes by discussing what Mill considers "the only real difficulty"Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 83. with utilitarian ethics: whether it might sometimes license acts of flagrant injustice. Critics of utilitarianism often claim that judging actions solely in terms of their effects on the general happiness is incompatible with a robust respect for individual rights and a duty to treat people as they deserve. Mill appreciates the force of this objection and argues #that feelings of justice are rooted in both a natural human desire to retaliate for injuries and a natural instinct for sympathy for those who have been wrongly injured; #that justice has a utilitarian basis since an injustice is committed only when a person's rights have been violated, and an alleged right should be protected by society only when doing so promotes the general happiness; #that people disagree deeply about what sorts of things are and are not just, and utilitarianism provides the only rational basis for resolving such conflicts.
This was the start of his prosperous career as a silk merchant. He visited England in 1826 and every year after. There he succeeded in business and also made valuable friendships. John Bowring, a follower of Jeremy Bentham, introduced utilitarianism to him.
But there are cross pressures. Against the freedom from "unreasoning fears" there is a feeling of malaise, of something lost. Heroism is lost in the leveling down of aspiration; utilitarianism is thought too flat and shallow. There is no room for death.
Utilitarianism as a moral philosophy argues that maximizing happiness should be the moral standard by which our actions should be measured. It thereby stands in contrast to the rationalistic ethics of Immanuel Kant as well as to the convictions of idealism, amongst others.
He believed both of these embody a sense of beauty, and most important, both realms recognize the significance of devoting oneself to an activity of the mind. Art is then a form of learning that finds and enriches the spirit and negates utilitarianism.
One of Smart's two entries in the Philosophical Lexicon refers to his approach to the consequences of act utilitarianism: to "outsmart" an opponent is "to embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument." This move is more commonly called "biting the bullet".
Health consequences of unsafe food, eating in overlarge quantities, are well documented yet in all societies there is no legislation against over-consumption. Ethical properties of utilitarianism and social justice conflict with humanity's freedom of choice in the determining of access to healthy, safe food.
Singer's views of utilitarianism have also been noted as some of the most influential of modern ethicists.Ross (1994), p. 35. His latest work as Emeritus Professor focused on Evil in the world. More to come from Debra Singer, who is Literary Executor of his works.
Multism may not necessarily include the feature of intrinsic values to have a negative side, e.g. the feature of utilitarianism to accept both pain as well as pleasure to be of intrinsic value, since they may be viewed as different sides of the same coin.
For Bentham on animals, see Ch. XVII Note 122. Bentham's utilitarianism is known for arguing that the felicific calculus should be used to determine the rightness and wrongness of acts. It does this by measuring the amount of pain and pleasure for various acts.
Nozick discusses in chapter 3 whether animals have rights too or whether they can be used, and if the species of the animal says anything about the extent to which this can be done. He also analyzes the proposal "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people".
In addition, other limitations of applying utilitarianism to animal research is that you cannot measure the pain and benefit of the tests and compare them accurately. Therefore, it is estimated that they are being compared when deducing whether a test is morally right or wrong.
Sobel is the author of more than 75 refereed publications in philosophy, as well as four books. His early publications focused on ethics, most notably utilitarianism, and determinism. Later in his career, his interests turned to decision theory and philosophy of religion.Sobel, Jordan Howard.
Priestley published more than 150 works on topics ranging from political philosophy to education to theology to natural philosophy.Thorpe, 74; Kramnick, 4. He led and inspired British radicals during the 1790s, paved the way for utilitarianism,Tapper, 322. and helped found Unitarianism.Schofield (2004), 3.
Sidgwick claims that there are three general methods of making value choices that are commonly used in ordinary morality: intuitionism, egoism, and utilitarianism. Intuitionism is the view that we can see straight off that some acts are right or wrong, and can grasp self-evident and unconditionally binding moral rules. Egoism, or “Egoistic Hedonism,” claims that each individual should seek his or her own greatest happiness. Utilitarianism, or “Universalistic Hedonism,” is the view that each person should promote the greatest amount of happiness on the whole. Most of Sidgwick’s 500-page book is devoted to a careful and systematic examination of these three methods.
Mill rejects a purely quantitative measurement of utility and says: The word utility is used to mean general well-being or happiness, and Mill's view is that utility is the consequence of a good action. Utility, within the context of utilitarianism, refers to people performing actions for social utility. With social utility, he means the well- being of many people. Mill's explanation of the concept of utility in his work, Utilitarianism, is that people really do desire happiness, and since each individual desires their own happiness, it must follow that all of us desire the happiness of everyone, contributing to a larger social utility.
In an introduction to an anthology of these articles, the editor was able to say: "The development of this theory was a dialectical process of formulation, criticism, reply and reformulation; the record of this process well illustrates the co-operative development of a philosophical theory." The essential difference is in what determines whether or not an action is the right action. Act utilitarianism maintains that an action is right if it maximizes utility; rule utilitarianism maintains that an action is right if it conforms to a rule that maximizes utility. In 1956, Urmson (1953) published an influential article arguing that Mill justified rules on utilitarian principles.
Published in 2019 by Duke University Press.Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed gives the historical idea on the association of use with life and strength in the 19th century and how utilitarianism helped shape individuals through useful ends. She also explores how use comes with restricted spaces.
22–23 According to translator Richard Pevear, the demons are "that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism."Pevear, Richard (1995). Foreword to Demons (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky). p.
Similarly to how there are many variations of consequentialism and negative utilitarianism, there are many versions of negative consequentialism, for example negative prioritarianism and negative consequentialist egalitarianism.“According to negative consequentialism such as negative prioritarianism, negative utilitarianism, and negative consequentialist egalitarianism...”Animal Ethics (2014) "Negative Consequentialism", Ethics and Animals G. E. Moore's ethics can be said to be a negative consequentialism (more precisely, a consequentialism with a negative utilitarian component), because he has been labeled a consequentialist,: “Moore is indeed a consequentialist.” and he said that "consciousness of intense pain is, by itself, a great evil" whereas "the mere consciousness of pleasure, however intense, does not, by itself, appear to be a great good, even if it has some slight intrinsic value. In short, pain (if we understand by this expression, the consciousness of pain) appears to be a far worse evil than pleasure is a good." Moore wrote in the first half of the 20th century before any of the terms 'consequentialism,' 'negative utilitarianism' or 'negative consequentialism' were coined, and he did not use the term 'negative consequentialism' himself.
He was an anti- apologist without ever agreeing to be atheist. Later philosophers have seen in Hume a basis for Utilitarianism and naturalism. Title page to the 1705 edition of Bernard de Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. In social and political philosophy, economics underlies much of the debate.
In criminology, the Neo-Classical School continues the traditions of the Classical School within the framework of Right Realism. Hence, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria remains a relevant social philosophy in policy term for using punishment as a deterrent through law enforcement, the courts, and imprisonment.
Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798,Mills, pp. 71–72. becoming a major influence on classical liberalism.Mills, p. 72. Utilitarianism provided the political justification for the implementation of economic liberalism by British governments which was to dominate economic policy from the 1830s.
Jeremy Bentham was an intellectual who focused on reforming English law. He was a leading promoter of utilitarianism as a working philosophy of action. The "greatest happiness principle", or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of Bentham's thought. By "happiness", he understood a predominance of "pleasure" over "pain".
" Schumacher argues that by removing the vertical dimension from the universe and the qualitative distinctions of "higher" and "lower" qualities which go with it, materialistic scientism can in the societal sphere only lead to moral relativism and utilitarianism. While in the personal sphere, answering the question "What do I do with my life?" leaves us with only two answers: selfishness and utilitarianism. In contrast, he argues that appreciating the different levels of being provides a simple but clear morality. The traditional view, as Schumacher says, has always been that the proper goal of humanity is "...to move higher, to develop one's highest faculties, to gain knowledge of the higher and highest things, and, if possible, to "see God".
Aspects of Parfit's mere addition paradox are still relevant here: Even though "Parfit's repugnant conclusion" (mentioned above) is avoided by average utilitarianism, some generally repugnant conclusions may still obtain.Parfit, Reasons and Persons, ch. 19 For instance, if there are two completely isolated societies, one a 100-hedon society and the other a 99-hedon society, then strict average utilitarianism seems to support killing off the 99-hedon society (this violent action would increase the average utility in this scenario). This criticism is also exemplified by Nozick's utility monster, a hypothetical being with a greater ability to gain utility from resources, who takes all those resources from people in a fashion that is seen as completely immoral.
Mill makes it clear throughout On Liberty that he "regard[s] utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions", a standard he inherited from his father, a follower of Jeremy Bentham. Though J. S. Mill claims that all of his principles on liberty appeal to the ultimate authority of utilitarianism, according to Nigel Warburton, much of the essay can seem divorced from his supposed final court of appeals. Mill seems to idealize liberty and rights at the cost of utility. For instance, Mill writes:Warburton 2008, John Stuart Mill On Liberty This claim seems to go against the principle of utilitarianism, that it is permissible that one should be harmed so that the majority could benefit.
Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek (born 7 August 1975) is a Polish utilitarian philosopher and an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy at University of Łódź. She has also taught at a summer seminar on utilitarian ethics at the European Graduate School and Spring School for PhD students at the Dutch Research School of Philosophy. She is best known for her collaborations with the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. In their 2012, 2014 and 2016 collaborations she and Singer set out to explain and defend act utilitarianism and suggest a resolution to what the late 19th century British philosopher Henry Sidgwick called “the profoundest problem of ethics”, the apparent rationality of both ethical egoism and utilitarianism.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Williams's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1972), Problems of the Self (1973), Utilitarianism: For and Against with J. J. C. Smart (1973), Moral Luck (1981) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), outlined his attacks on the twin pillars of ethics: utilitarianism and the moral philosophy of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Martha Nussbaum wrote that his work "denounced the trivial and evasive way in which moral philosophy was being practised in England under the aegis of those two dominant theories." "Both theories simplified the moral life," she wrote, "neglecting emotions and personal attachments and how sheer luck shapes our choices."Nussbaum 2009, 213.
Williams set out the case against utilitarianism – a consequentialist position the simplest version of which is that actions are right only insofar as they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number – in Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973) with J. J. C. Smart. One of the book's thought experiments involves Jim, a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. Jim finds himself in a small town facing 20 captured Indian rebels. The captain who has arrested them says that if Jim will kill one, the others will be released in honour of Jim's status as a guest, but if he does not, they will all be killed.
" . The taxonomy is phrased in terms of 'negativisms,' which appear to be the same as 'negativist' and 'negative' utilitarianisms: "we believe that disutility has greater weight than utility. The overall aim with this part of our essay is to give an account of this weight, which means that we shall try to formulate a welfarist act-consequentialism that takes seriously the weight of disutility. In other words, we are looking for an acceptable negativist utilitarianism." . In total, they distinguish among 16 kinds of negative utilitarianism. They first distinguish between strong negativism and weak negativism. Strong negativism "give all weight to disutility" and weak negativism "give some weight to positive utility, but more weight to disutility.
A hypothetical being, which Nozick calls the utility monster, receives much more utility from each unit of a resource they consume than anyone else does. For instance, eating a cookie might bring only one unit of pleasure to an ordinary person but could bring 100 units of pleasure to a utility monster. If the utility monster can get so much pleasure from each unit of resources, it follows from utilitarianism that the distribution of resources should acknowledge this. If the utility monster existed, it would justify the mistreatment and perhaps annihilation of everyone else, according to the mandates of utilitarianism, because, for the utility monster, the pleasure they receive outweighs the suffering they may cause.
Others have argued that the resources provided by classical ethical theory such as utilitarianism, consequentialism and deontological ethics is more than enough to deal with all the ethical issues emerging from our design and use of information technology.Bernard, G. (1999). Common Morality and Computing. Ethics and Information Technology 1(1).
Rational choice theory grew out of the expected utility principle in economic theory, i.e. that people will make rational decisions based on their expectations for utility maximization. To that extent, it fits the model of utilitarianism as proposed by the Classical School, but its implications are doubted by the Neoclassical School.
Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics which states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Classical utilitarians, including Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain.
His work has largely focused on utilitarianism and on luck egalitarianism. He is also a proponent of prioritarianism."Luck Egalitarianism and Prioritarianism," Ethics 110, No. 2 (January, 2000). Arneson has also critiqued Marxism, arguing that capitalism was exploitative for more complex reasons than the labour theory of value accounted for.
A Communist society utilises a utilitarian based moral approach as a means to preserve the society. In this system the rights of the collective are placed above the rights of individuals. The utilitarian paradigm represents "the greatest happiness principle" as theorized by John Stuart Mill.Mills. J. S. (Ed.). (1979). Utilitarianism.
In 1960, Artschwager received a commission from the Catholic Church to construct portable altars for ships. This led him to consider how to transcend the utilitarianism of tables, chairs, and cabinets,Day, Holliday T. (1991). Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art, 1961–1991, p. 37. Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Bostrom (2005), 16. He defends a version of negative utilitarianism. He outlines how drugs and technologies, including intracranial self-stimulation ("wireheading"), designer drugs and genetic engineering could end suffering for all sentient life. Mental suffering will be a relic of the past, just as physical suffering during surgery was eliminated by anaesthesia.
De Lazari-Radek explains her normative position as a hedonistic utilitarian. She persuaded Singer to embrace hedonism instead of preference utilitarianism during their collaboration on The Point of View of the Universe. She is exploring the matter more carefully in her two upcoming books on well-being and pleasure in Polish and English.
She and Singer use an evolutionary debunking argument to damage egoism but leave utilitarianism unscathed. In On What Matters Vol 3. Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit (1942–2017) expressed the view that their argument against the rationality of egoism carried "some force" though, as Lazari-Radek and Singer themselves acknowledge, it is not "decisive".
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a book by the English philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham "originally printed in 1780, and first published in 1789." Bentham's "most important theoretical work," it is where Bentham develops his theory of utilitarianism and is the first major book on the topic.
Overall, the stark difference in morality between characters of dissimilar social status suggests Dickens' idea that there is a form of innate natural law that may remain unhampered in those leading less titled lives. Stephen's concept of right and wrong is untainted by the manufactured values of utilitarianism, instilled into Tom and Bounderby.
Jeremy Bentham's book The Principles of Morals and Legislation prioritized goods by considering pleasure, pain and consequences. This theory had a wide effect on public affairs, up to and including the present day. A similar system was later named Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. More broadly, utilitarian theories are examples of Consequentialism.
Callicott claims that philosophers and laypersons should not adopt one theory, say utilitarianism, for one purpose or in one context and another theory, say Kantian deontology, for another purpose or in another context (this would be theoretical pluralism).Callicott, J. Baird (1990). “The Case Against Moral Pluralism.” Environmental Ethics 12: 99-124.
Sandel discusses liberalism, the work of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism. He criticizes the philosopher John Rawls, evaluating his ideas as advanced in A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), and other works. He also criticizes the philosopher Robert Nozick, and his ideas as advanced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).
One common tactic among consequentialists, particularly those committed to an altruistic (selfless) account of consequentialism, is to employ an ideal, neutral observer from which moral judgements can be made. John Rawls, a critic of utilitarianism, argues that utilitarianism, in common with other forms of consequentialism, relies on the perspective of such an ideal observer. The particular characteristics of this ideal observer can vary from an omniscient observer, who would grasp all the consequences of any action, to an ideally informed observer, who knows as much as could reasonably be expected, but not necessarily all the circumstances or all the possible consequences. Consequentialist theories that adopt this paradigm hold that right action is the action that will bring about the best consequences from this ideal observer's perspective.
Moore died in 1958; the same year that both of the terms 'consequentialism' and 'negative utilitarianism' seem to have been coined. According to , "It seems that the term 'consequentialism' has been coined by E. Anscombe in her influential article 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958)." is widely considered to have coined the term 'negative utilitarianism.' Similarly to Moore, Ingemar Hedenius defended a consequentialism that could be called negative (or could be said to have a negative utilitarian component) because he assigned more importance to suffering than to happiness. Hedenius saw the worst in life, such as infernalistic suffering, as so evil that calculations of happiness versus suffering become unnecessary; he did not see that such evil could be counterbalanced by any good, such as happiness.
In the 1958 article where R. N. Smart introduced the term "negative utilitarianism", he argued against it, stating that negative utilitarianism would entail that a ruler who is able to instantly and painlessly destroy the human race, "a benevolent world-exploder", would have a duty to do so.: "Suppose that a ruler controls a weapon capable of instantly and painlessly destroying the human race. Now it is empirically certain that there would be some suffering before all those alive on any proposed destruction day were to die in the natural course of events. Consequently the use of the weapon is bound to diminish suffering, and would be the ruler's duty on NU grounds." For his use of the term ‘the benevolent world-exploder’ see page 543.
Unlike classical utilitarianism, in which right actions are defined as those that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, preference utilitarianism entails promoting actions that fulfil the interests (preferences) of those beings involved.Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2011, p. 13 The beings may be rational, that is to say, their interests may be carefully selected based on future projections, but this is not compulsory; here "beings" extends to all sentient beings, even those living solely in the present (that is, those without the intellectual capacity to contemplate long-term needs or consequences). Since what is good and right depends solely on individual preferences, there can be nothing that is in itself good or bad: for preference utilitarians, the source of both morality and ethics in general is subjective preference.
In the last few selected articles of the book, Zhou expresses his fear regarding the dominant role technologies play in the modern society. Zhou’s worry about the possibility that mankind was incapable of handling the technologies they invented was thought to embody his objection to utilitarianism and his pursuit of a simple and natural lifestyle.
The Elements of Moral Philosophy is a 1986 ethics textbook by the philosophers James Rachels and Stuart Rachels. It explains a number of moral theories and topics, including cultural relativism, subjectivism, divine command theory, ethical egoism, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and deontology. The book uses real-life examples in explaining the theories.
Classical liberals saw utility as the foundation for public policies. This broke both with conservative "tradition" and Lockean "natural rights", which were seen as irrational. Utility, which emphasises the happiness of individuals, became the central ethical value of all liberalism. Although utilitarianism inspired wide-ranging reforms, it became primarily a justification for laissez-faire economics.
Latouche is a specialist in North-South economic and cultural relations, and in the epistemology of the social sciences. He has developed a critical theory towards economic orthodoxy. He denounces economism, utilitarianism in social sciences, consumer society and the notion of sustainable development. He particularly criticizes the notions of economic efficiency and economic rationalism.
Furthermore, he makes the argument that if he were to approach animal rights through a contractarianism, when somebody kicks your dog, it is morally wrong because it upsets you but not the dog. Intuitively, this does not make sense, and contractarianism can be dismissed. His argument against utilitarianism is a bit more complicated.Regan, Tom.
For right-libertarians, property rights are natural rights. Thus, it would be acceptable for the above farmer to plant on a slope as long as this action does not limit the freedom of his or her neighbors. This view is closely connected to utilitarianism. Libertarians often use utilitarian arguments to support their own arguments.
During his university studies at the ENS, Durkheim was influenced by two neo-Kantian scholars: Charles Bernard Renouvier and Émile Boutroux. The principles Durkheim absorbed from them included rationalism, scientific study of morality, anti-utilitarianism, and secular education. His methodology was influenced by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a supporter of the scientific method.
Most consequentialist theories focus on promoting some sort of good consequences. However, negative utilitarianism lays out a consequentialist theory that focuses solely on minimizing bad consequences. One major difference between these two approaches is the agent's responsibility. Positive consequentialism demands that we bring about good states of affairs, whereas negative consequentialism requires that we avoid bad ones.
Although his moral system shares similarities to deontology, rule utilitarianism, and contractarianism, Gert does not ally himself with any of those positions.Bernard Gert, Morality: Its Nature and Justification, Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. xiii. He writes, "I think that my view is best characterized as a natural law theory . . . in the tradition of Hobbes".
Utilitarianism can be used as a justification for or an argument against suicide. For example, through Jeremy Bentham's hedonistic calculus, it can be concluded that although the death of a depressed person ends their suffering, the person's family and friends may grieve as well, their pain outweighing the release of depression of a single individual through suicide.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social and legislative reformer. He was a major proponent of Utilitarianism, based on the idea of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number", which he was the first to systematise, introducing it as the "principle of utility".Bentham 1823, pp. 1–2; Driver 2009, Section 2.1.
Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student John Stuart Mill, who sharply criticized Bentham's view of human nature, which failed to recognize conscience as a human motive. Mill considered Bentham's view "to have done and to be doing very serious evil."Mill, John Stuart. 1897. Early Essays of John Stuart Mill. London. pp. 401–04.
Jeremy Bentham (; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4 February 1747] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."Betham, Jeremy.
There may be both positive and negative value regarding intrinsic value, wherein something of positive intrinsic value is something that for itself is purposed to be pursued or maximized, while is something of negative intrinsic value is best to avoid or minimize. For instance, in utilitarianism, pleasure has positive intrinsic value and suffering has negative intrinsic value.
Since there are many ways to reduce suffering which do not infringe on other value systems, it makes sense for negative utilitarians to focus on these options. In an extended interpretation of negative utilitarianism, cooperation with other value systems is considered and the conclusion is that it is better to reduce suffering without violating other value systems.
His insights about the relations between egoism and utilitarianism have stimulated much valuable research. And his way of framing moral problems, by asking about the relations between commonsense beliefs and the best available theories, has set much of the agenda for twentieth-century ethics.”Schneewind, J. B. Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, p. 422.
He also produced photomontages and abstract art films. Szczuka participated in several international exhibitions such as the "First exhibition of modern art" in Bucharest. A promoter of utilitarianism in Poland, Szczuka joined the group of avantgarde artists "Blok". Diagnosed with tuberculosis, in 1923 Mieczysław Szczuka moved to the mountain resort of Zakopane at the foot of Tatras.
In 1897 Meijers entered the University of Amsterdam to study law. He finished his doctorate under Johannes Houwing in April 1903. His dissertation had an emphasis on philosophy, defending utilitarianism against Kant's rationalism and posing that in general well-being should be the final goal of every law institution. After his studies he ran a law practice in Amsterdam.
Care ethics contrasts with more well-known ethical models, such as consequentialist theories (e.g. utilitarianism) and deontological theories (e.g., Kantian ethics) in that it seeks to incorporate traditionally feminized virtues and values that—proponents of care ethics contend—are absent in such traditional models of ethics. These values include the importance of empathetic relationships and compassion.
In Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Collier Macmillan: 343. if it follows the rule or moral law. According to the deontological view, people have a duty to act in a way that does those things that are inherently good as acts ("truth-telling" for example), or follow an objectively obligatory rule (as in rule utilitarianism).
Although Mill agreed with Bentham about many of the foundational principles of ethics, he also had some major disagreements. In particular, Mill tried to develop a more refined form of utilitarianism that would harmonize better with ordinary morality and highlight the importance in the ethical life of intellectual pleasures, self-development, high ideals of character, and conventional moral rules.
DesJardins, Joseph R. Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy, 5th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2013, p. 179 Although Leopold is credited with coining the term "land ethic", there are many philosophical theories that speak to how humans should treat the land. Some of the most prominent land ethics include those rooted in economics, utilitarianism, libertarianism, egalitarianism, and ecology.
Jean-Pierre Voyer (born 1938, Bolbec) is a post-situationist French philosopher. His main thesis is the non-existence of economy, and he claims to be inspired by Hegel and Marx, although he is very critical of the latter. He criticizes utilitarianism. Jorion has also published in the Revue de Mauss, a French anti-utilitarian journal.
The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution. Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say and David Ricardo, it drew on classical economics and economic ideas as espoused by Smith in The Wealth of Nations and stressed the belief in progress, natural lawAppleby, Joyce (1992). Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. p. 58. and utilitarianism.
Peik Herfeh also wrote a variety of articles from Iranian School and Islamic Philosophy to Western Analytic and moral philosophy which is his profession. As an author, Shirzad Peik Herfeh wrote two books in the fields of moral philosophy which called as Borders of Ethics () and Utilitarianism (). Both of them released in Iran in 2012 and 2015 respectively.
Jeremy Bentham Bentham's book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was printed in 1780 but not published until 1789. It is possible that Bentham was spurred on to publish after he saw the success of Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy.Rosen, Frederick. 2003. Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill. Routledge. p. 132.
As Rosen (2003) has pointed out, claiming that act utilitarians are not concerned about having rules is to set up a "straw man." Similarly, R.M. Hare refers to "the crude caricature of act utilitarianism which is the only version of it that many philosophers seem to be acquainted with."Hare, R. M. (1981) Moral Thinking. Oxford Univ.
The overarching goal of utilitarianism—the ideal consequence—is to achieve the "greatest good for the greatest number as the end result of human action."Freeman, Stephen J., Dennis W. Engels, and Michael K. Altekruse. "Foundations for Ethical Standards and Codes: The Role of Moral Philosophy and Theory in Ethics", Counseling and Values, vol. 48, no.
3, 2004, pp. 163–173, eLibrary. In Utilitarianism, Mill states that "happiness is the sole end of human action". This statement aroused some controversy, which is why Mill took it a step further, explaining how the very nature of humans wanting happiness, and who "take it to be reasonable under free consideration", demands that happiness is indeed desirable.
The concept of "ethical egoism" was introduced by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in his book The Methods of Ethics, written in 1874. Sidgwick compared egoism to the philosophy of utilitarianism, writing that whereas utilitarianism sought to maximize overall pleasure, egoism focused only on maximizing individual pleasure. In 1890, psychologist William James examined the concept of self esteem in his influential textbook Principles of Psychology. Robert H. Wozniak later wrote that William James's theory of self-love in this book was measured in "... three different but interrelated aspects of self: the material self (all those aspects of material existence in which we feel a strong sense of ownership, our bodies, our families, our possessions), the social self (our felt social relations), and the spiritual self (our feelings of our own subjectivity)".
Rule utilitarianism is a form of utilitarianism that says an action is right as it conforms to a rule that leads to the greatest good, or that "the rightness or wrongness of a particular action is a function of the correctness of the rule of which it is an instance". Philosophers Richard Brandt and Brad Hooker are major proponents of such an approach. For rule utilitarians, the correctness of a rule is determined by the amount of good it brings about when followed. In contrast, act utilitarians judge an act in terms of the consequences of that act alone (such as stopping at a red light), rather than judging whether it faithfully adhered to the rule of which it was an instance (such as, "always stop at red lights").
Thomas Metzinger proposes the "principle of negative utilitarianism", which is the broad idea that suffering should be minimized when possible.: “In terms of a fundamental solidarity of all suffering beings against suffering, something that almost all of us should be able to agree on is what I will term the “principle of negative utilitarianism”: Whatever else our exact ethical commitments and specific positive goals are, we can and should certainly all agree that, in principle, and whenever possible, the overall amount of conscious suffering in all beings capable of conscious suffering should be minimized. I know that it is impossible to give any truly conclusive argument in favor of this principle. And, of course, there exist all kinds of theoretical complications—for example, individual rights, long-term preferences, and epistemic indeterminacy.
Singer thinks this going-beyond identifies moral reasons as "somehow universal", specifically in the injunction to 'love thy neighbour as thyself', interpreted by him as demanding that one give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one's own interests. This universalising step, which Singer traces from Kant to Hare, is crucial and sets him apart from those moral theorists, from Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence. Universalisation leads directly to utilitarianism, Singer argues, on the strength of the thought that one's own interests cannot count for more than the interests of others. Taking these into account, one must weigh them up and adopt the course of action that is most likely to maximise the interests of those affected; utilitarianism has been arrived at.
Elevated view of the panopticon prison, by Reveley 1791. The word panopticon derives from the Greek word for "all seeing" – panoptes. In 1785, Jeremy Bentham, an English social reformer and founder of utilitarianism, travelled to Krichev in White Russia (modern Belarus) to visit his brother, Samuel, who accompanied Prince Potemkin. Bentham arrived in Krichev in early 1786 and stayed for almost two years.
Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. It drew on classical economics, especially the economic ideas as espoused by Adam Smith in Book One of The Wealth of Nations and on a belief in natural law, progress and utilitarianism. As a term, classical liberalism has often been applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism.
Care ethics contrasts with more well-known ethical models, such as consequentialist theories (e.g. utilitarianism) and deontological theories (e.g. Kantian ethics) in that it seeks to incorporate traditionally feminized virtues and values which, proponents of care ethics contend, are absent in such traditional models of ethics. One of these values is the placement of caring and relationship over that of logic and reason.
The earlier sketches in particular were frequently cited as masterpieces in their own right. The account of Bentham, for example, was notable both as "the first sustained critique of dogmatic Utilitarianism" and as a major anticipation of modern journalism. The essay on Coleridge was praised for its stylistic triumphs and for being one of the best contemporary accounts of the man.Park, p. 229.
Jim Marchuk is an experimental psychologist at the University of Manitoba and a subscriber to utilitarianism. When a murder trial begins in Atlanta, the defendant's lawyers ask Jim to testify on their behalf. They cite Marchuk's technique for detecting psychopaths, based on saccadic eye motion, which he claims outperforms the Hare checklist. Based on his objection to the death penalty, Jim agrees.
He also criticized Francis Bacon and denounced literary naturalism and utilitarianism. His central emphasis was on the individual moral character and human reason. He put stress on self- discipline and the need to control impulses seeking liberation from all restraints. He opposed naturalism on the grounds that it emphasizes the dominance of external natural forces over the strength of character and individual conscience.
However, one may reply to negative utilitarianism..." In the book, Popper emphasizes the importance of preventing suffering in public policy.For example, Popper wrote, "I suggest, for this reason, to replace the utilitarian formula ‘Aim at the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number’, or briefly, ‘Maximize happiness’ by the formula ‘The least amount of avoidable suffering for all’, or briefly, ‘Minimize suffering’.
One of his other criticisms is the denial of spirituality in the Western philosophy. In fact, those ideologies [which ideologies?] attempt to prevent humans from achieving transcendental goals and any [evolutionary movements - check translation]. In this vein, he firmly criticized capitalism, and at the same time, he admired socialism because it would lead humanity to evolution and free it from utilitarianism.
In a 2018 article published in Psychological Review, researchers pointed out that, as measures of utilitarian decisions, sacrificial dilemmas such as the trolley problem measure only one facet of proto-utilitarian tendencies, namely permissive attitudes toward instrumental harm, while ignoring impartial concern for the greater good. As such, the authors argued that the trolley problem provides only a partial measure of utilitarianism.
In the final chapter Cochrane argues that each school has an important contribution to make to animal justice, particularly liberalism and utilitarianism. He then outlines his own approach.Cochrane 2010, pp. 136–45. He writes that, while talk of our political and moral obligations to animals is today more prominent than ever, it remains on the periphery of mainstream dialogue in political theory.
Faria asserts, "it is centered on utilitarianism, monetary considerations, and the fiscal and political interests of the state, rather than committed to placing the interest of the individual patient or experimental subject above all other considerations". For her part, Gutmann believes the next step is "to examine more deeply the ethical implications of neuroscience research and its effects on society".
From 1923 to 1938, he was professor of botany at Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University. He edited two voluminous colour plate floras – ”Billeder af Nordens Flora” and “Vilde Planter i Norden”. Mentz was chairman of the state advisory board on conservation (”Naturfredningsrådet”) 1925-1944. However, with his background in moor reclamation, he had a foot in both camps – utilitarianism and conservationism.
Qian Xuesen pointed out that modern cities' worship of power and capital leads to maximization and utilitarianism. "Buildings in cities should not become living machines. Even the most powerful technology and tools can never endow the city with a soul." To Ma Yansong, Shanshui does not just refer to nature; it is also the individual's emotional response to the surrounding world.
Višak is known for her exploration of the ethics of killing nonhuman animals who have lived happy lives, and specifically her rejection of the idea that it is acceptable to kill animals for agricultural purposes provided they have pleasant lives. She challenges Peter Singer's idea that nonhuman animals are "replaceable", meaning that it is acceptable to kill nonhuman animals provided an equally happy animal is created to take their place. In her book Killing Happy Animals, Višak explores this and the related "logic of the larder"—the idea that farming nonhuman animals benefits them, as they would not exist otherwise—from within utilitarianism. She suggests that the replaceability argument is based on Total View Utilitarianism, which entails that the utility of both actual and potential beings (the latter being individuals whose existence or non-existence depends upon the actions of others now).
The main target of Popanilla's satire is utilitarianism. Prior to discovering the knowledge of Benthamite theory brought to him by the shipwrecked books, Popanilla lives in a "state of nature" similar to paradise.Schwarz p79 Popanilla's advocacy of man being a "developing animal" is "a parody of utilitarianism".Schwarz p79 Popanilla observes all the features and absurdities of the highly developed Vraibleusia culminating in the economic ruin, depression and violence following the expeditionary fleet's failure but still maintains to one of its victims, Skindeep, that he (Skindeep) is happy because: > he might therefore still be a useful member of society; that, if he were > useful, he must therefore be good; and that if he were good, he must > therefore be happy; because happiness is the consequence of assisting the > beneficial development of the ameliorating principles of the social > action.
Andrews 2014, p. 659. The book closes with a consideration of the relationship between a Harean approach to animal ethics and Singer's approach; Varner argues that Singer has employed two-level utilitarianism, and implicitly supports the idea of near-persons. Varmer also argues that Singer, despite the latter's advocacy for vegetarianism, presents a theory that supports certain forms of humane agriculture.Attfield and Humphreys 2012, pp. 496–7.
Marcello Maestro, "A pioneer for the abolition of capital punishment: Cesare Beccaria." Journal of the History of Ideas 34.3 (1973): 463-468. online In England Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of modern utilitarianism, called for the abolition of the death penalty. Beccaria, and later Charles Dickens and Karl Marx noted the incidence of increased violent criminality at the times and places of executions.
Rule consequentialism exists in the forms of rule utilitarianism and rule egoism. Various theorists are split as to whether the rules are the only determinant of moral behavior or not. For example, Robert Nozick held that a certain set of minimal rules, which he calls "side- constraints," are necessary to ensure appropriate actions. There are also differences as to how absolute these moral rules are.
48 In ethics, he embraced utilitarianism, agreeing with John Stuart Mill that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity. He was a staunch critic of Herbert Spencer's attempt to extend Darwinism into a law of cosmic and social progress. Like Mill and Auguste Comte, Wright embraced a positivistic approach to science that rejects the possibility (or even meaningfulness) of metaphysics.Madden, Chauncey Wright, p. 91.
Contemporary ethicists Derek Parfit and Peter Singer have acknowledged Sidgwick as a major influence on their thought. As Sidgwick scholar J. B. Schneewind has noted, the Methods “is widely viewed as one of the best works of moral philosophy ever written. His account of classical utilitarianism is unsurpassed. His discussions of the general status of morality and of particular moral concepts are models of clarity and acumen.
Boston: FlatWorld. . Retrieved 25 April 2020. While modern sociological theory descends predominately from functionalist (Durkheim) and conflict-oriented (Marx and Weber) perspectives of social structure, it also takes great influence from the symbolic interactionist tradition, accounting for theories of pragmatism (Mead, Cooley) and micro-level structure (Simmel). Likewise, utilitarianism (aka "rational choice" or "social exchange"), although often associated with economics, is an established tradition within sociological theory.
In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were consequences, in part, of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, an outcome of its colonial European and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigour.
He felt consequentialism particularly utilitarianism was inappropriate in ethics as it attempts to apply quantitative measures to something of a qualitative nature. Adler's social philosophy opposed commercialism. He claimed, "The root disease that afflicts the world at the present day is the supremacy of the commercial point of view." His thought prized public works and the use of reason to develop ultimate ethical standards.
He was wary of allied decadence, complacent, corrosive of an innocent romanticism expanded into mysticism. His ideas were challenged as "objectively impossible"; Weimar lacked clarity and leadership, while Rathenau was deterministic, and robust over the details. A Levee en masse would be part of this utilitarianism that bestrode his menschen philosophies. This contradistinction about an "unravelled" Versailles which was incompatible with Fulfillment and the role of Reconstruction.
Like Bentham, Mill believed that ultimate ends and first principles cannot be demonstrated, since they lie at the foundation of everything else that we know and believe. Nevertheless, he claims, "[c]onsiderations may be presented capable of determining the intellect,"John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1987, pp. 16-17. which amount to something close to a proof of the principle of utility.
Topics included abortion, euthanasia, consent and medical experimentation. Philosophical paradigms included J.S. Mill's utilitarianism, Kant's universalizability, W.D. Ross's ranking system of prima-facia duties. From 1985 to 1991 he was also Adjunct Professor of Medicine at McMaster University's Faculty of Health Sciences. He was a columnist for The Canadian Doctor from 1986 to 1988, and a columnist for Canadian Family Physician from 1991 to 1996.
Wundt's ethics can, put simply, be interpreted as an attempt to mediate between Kant's apriorism and empiricism. Moral rules are the legislative results of a universal intellectual development, but are neither rigidly defined nor do they simply follow changing life conditions. Individualism and utilitarianism are strictly rejected. In his view, only the universal intellectual life can be considered to be an end in itself.
Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. The philosopher and animal studies scholar Anna Peterson, reviewing the book for the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, characterised Killing Happy Animals as "carefully argued, well-organized, and clearly written", but somewhat repetitive. Though she considered it worth reading, she felt that the book's scope was limited by Višak's focus on utilitarianism.
Historian Andrzej Walicki argued that the form of economic determinism espoused by Tkachev differed significantly with the historical materialism developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, stating: "This specific 'economic materialism' of Tkachev did not amount to Marxism; it constituted rather in a peculiar mixture of some elements of Marxism with a rather primitive utilitarianism, grossly exaggerating the role of direct economic motivation in individual behavior".
More than the novel itself, the book is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for the response it garnered. Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, as well as in his 1872 novel Demons. Leo Tolstoy wrote his own What Is to Be Done?, published in 1886, based on his own ideas of moral responsibility.
Davis, G. Scott. 2005. "Introduction", Introduction to Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill, VII–XIV. Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading. By this logic the only valid way to discern what is proper reason would be to view the consequences of any action and weigh the good and the bad, even if on the surface, the ethical reasoning seems to indicate a different train of thought.
Interests, Animal Rights, and Environmental Ethics, which was a part of Oxford University Press's Environmental Ethics and Science Policy Series, edited by Kristin Schrader-Frechette.Varner 1998. Varner was promoted to full professor in 2010, and acted as department head from 2011 to 2014. Varner's second monograph, Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in the Two-Level Utilitarianism of R. M. Hare, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press.
Two-level utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics developed by R. M. Hare. According to the theory, a person's moral decisions should be based on a set of moral rules, except in certain rare situations where it is more appropriate to engage in a 'critical' level of moral reasoning. Consequentialists believe that an action is right if it produces the best possible state of affairs.Beauchamp, Tom L. (1991).
"Consequentialists", as described by Peter Singer, "start not with moral rules, but with goals. They assess actions by the extent to which they further those goals." Singer also notes that utilitarianism is "the best-known, though not the only, consequentialist theory." Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness of that conduct.
Utilitarianism addresses problems with moral motivation neglected by Kantianism by giving a central role to happiness. It is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good of the society.Salters-Nuffield Advanced Biology for Edexcel A2 Biology 2009. It is thus one form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its resulting outcome.
Statue on University of Chicago campus Linnaeus's applied science was inspired not only by the instrumental utilitarianism general to the early Enlightenment, but also by his adherence to the older economic doctrine of Cameralism.Koerner (1999), p. 95–96. Additionally, Linnaeus was a state interventionist. He supported tariffs, levies, export bounties, quotas, embargoes, navigation acts, subsidised investment capital, ceilings on wages, cash grants, state-licensed producer monopolies, and cartels.
Maximizing total benefits or utilitarianism can be accomplished by saving the most lives or by prognosis (life years). While saving the most lives is best if all else is equal, all else is seldom equal. Going by prognosis alone might unfairly favor improving the health of a person who is healthy to begin with. Promoting and rewarding social usefulness can be accomplished through instrumental value or by reciprocity.
Geoffrey Scarre is a moral philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Durham. His research focuses on a cluster of topics in applied ethics and moral philosophy broadly construed, including evil, the Holocaust, death, forgiveness, courage, the ethics of archaeology, and utilitarianism, with a special interest in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. He is the director of the Centre for the Ethics of Cultural Heritage.
In his 1863 book Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill defends the concept of rights in terms of utility: "To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility." Whether Mill was a rule utilitarian is a matter of controversy.
A more sophisticated SRU response is that # the above scenario is very improbable. # in the majority of situations, telling the truth leads to more trust and happiness. # if applied universally (à la Kant's categorical imperative), the rule against lying would create net utility. This position is most notably argued by John C. Harsanyi (in an essay included in "Utilitarianism and beyond", edited by A. Sen and B. Williams, Reprint 2010).
Utilitarian cake-cutting (also called maxsum cake-cutting) is a rule for dividing a heterogeneous resource, such as a cake or a land-estate, among several partners with different cardinal utility functions, such that the sum of the utilities of the partners is as large as possible. It is inspired by the utilitarian philosophy. Utilitarian cake-cutting is often not "fair"; hence, utilitarianism is in conflict with fair cake-cutting.
Nussbaum (2004) writes that utilitarianism, starting with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, has contributed more to the recognition of the moral status of animals than any other ethical theory.Nussbaum (2004), p. 302. The utilitarian philosopher most associated with animal rights is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Singer is not a rights theorist, but uses the language of rights to discuss how we ought to treat individuals.
He is a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences (interests) of those affected.For a discussion of preference utilitarianism, see Singer (2011), pp. 14ff, 94ff. His position is that there is no reason not to give equal consideration to the interests of human and nonhumans, though his principle of equality does not require identical treatment.
The Utilitarians were one of the targets of Dickens' satire. Utilitarianism was a prevalent school of thought during this period, its founders being Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, father to political theorist John Stuart Mill. Bentham's former secretary, Edwin Chadwick, helped design the Poor Law of 1834, which deliberately made workhouse life as uncomfortable as possible. In the novel, this attitude is conveyed in Bitzer's response to Gradgrind's appeal for compassion.
Ludwig von Mises Although Rothbard adopted Ludwig von Mises' deductive methodology for his social theory and economics,Grimm, Curtis M.; Hunn, Lee; Smith, Ken G. Strategy as Action: Competitive Dynamics and Competitive Advantage. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. p. 43 he parted with Mises on the question of ethics. Specifically, he rejected Mises conviction that ethical values remain subjective and opposed utilitarianism in favor of principle-based, natural law reasoning.
Stephen, mainly for family reasons, returned to England in the spring of 1872. During the voyage he wrote a series of articles which resulted in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873–1874)--a protest against John Stuart Mill's neo-utilitarianism. Most famously he attacked the thesis of J S Mill's essay On Liberty and argued for legal compulsion, coercion and restraint in the interests of morality and religion.Kimball, Roger (2005).
Foot's version of the thought experiment, now known as "Trolley Driver", ran as follows: A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to classical utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all).Barcalow, Emmett, Moral Philosophy: Theories and Issues. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2007. Print.
Cochrane's own sympathies lie most strongly with utilitarianism and liberalism; his own account is most influenced by them.Garner 2012, p. 98. He argues that rights derived from considerations of interests can protect individual animals and place limits on what can be done to them. These rights cannot be violated, even in the name of the greater good, which means that the cultural and economic practices of human beings will be affected.
It was considered to be a generalized form of utilitarianism. Building off of ideals from John Harsanyi, he clarified his economic beliefs in response to recent criticisms of his mentor, Amartya Sen. Mongin's research program on normative economics was implemented at the Université catholique de Louvain, where he was a visiting professor from 1991 to 1996. At the same time, he aimed to develop a form of logic for game theory.
In Ariel, Rodó surveys the situation Latin America was facing at the end of the 19th century. He points out that utilitarianism relies on specialization and materialism, and that consequently, the wealth of our minds is affected. Such practice can and will affect the spirit. In order for Latin America to revive its spirit, Rodó proposed strict adherence to the aesthetic ideals of the Greek and the Roman cultures.
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot, , p 61 Still, the work was deeply influential, in its attack on Utilitarianism and its devotion to rational thinking over the heart,The Return to Camelot, p. 62 his lack of interest in intellectual ability,The Return to Camelot, p. 64 and his disdain for making moneyThe Return to Camelot, p. 66 all had serious impact on the Victorian notion of a proper gentleman.
The theory has received discussion in popular and academic contexts, with critical responses from farming groups and mixed responses from moral and political theorists. Other work has included a defence of a neopragmatist approach to animal ethics, along with criticism of the metaethical and metaphilosophical assumptions of mainstream animal ethicists. Hadley has also conducted research on normative issues related to animal rights extremism, the aiding of others, and utilitarianism.
Hodgson wrote numerous philosophical articles, mainly dealing with issues in philosophy of the mind.Philosophical Articles by David Hodgson He wrote primarily on the topics of free will and consciousness. Hodgson authored three books published by Oxford University Press, Consequences of Utilitarianism (1967), The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World (1991) and Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (2011). The judge also wrote on probability and plausible reasoning.
Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, proposed a negative utilitarianism, which prioritizes the reduction of suffering over the enhancement of happiness when speaking of utility: "I believe that there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure. (...) human suffering makes a direct moral appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway." David Pearce, for his part, advocates a utilitarianism that aims straightforwardly at the abolition of suffering through the use of biotechnology (see more details below in section Biology, neurology, psychology). Another aspect worthy of mention here is that many utilitarians since Bentham hold that the moral status of a being comes from its ability to feel pleasure and pain: therefore, moral agents should consider not only the interests of human beings but also those of (other) animals.
Preference utilitarianism therefore can be distinguished by its acknowledgement that every person's experience of satisfaction is unique. The theory, as outlined by R. M. Hare in 1981, is controversial, insofar as it presupposes some basis by which a conflict between A's preferences and B's preferences can be resolved (for example, by weighting them mathematically). In a similar vein, Peter Singer, for much of his career a major proponent of preference utilitarianism and himself influenced by the views of Hare, has been criticised for giving priority to the views of beings capable of holding preferences (being able actively to contemplate the future and its interaction with the present) over those solely concerned with their immediate situation, a group that includes many animals and young children. Hence, in cases of abortion, the views of the parent (however selfish or not, as the case may be) are prioritised over those of the fetus, without recourse to any (perceived) rights (here, the "right to life").
In other words, free will leads everyone to make actions inclined on their own happiness, unless reasoned that it would improve the happiness of others, in which case, the greatest utility is still being achieved. To that extent, the utilitarianism that Mill is describing is a default lifestyle that he believes is what people who have not studied a specific opposing field of ethics would naturally and subconsciously use when faced with decision. Utilitarianism is thought of by some of its activists to be a more developed and overarching ethical theory of Immanuel Kant's belief in goodwill, and not just some default cognitive process of humans. Where Kant would argue that reason can only be used properly by goodwill, Mill would say that the only way to universally create fair laws and systems would be to step back to the consequences, whereby Kant's ethical theories become based around the ultimate good—utility.
The first part offers a reconstruction and analysis of Hare's philosophy, while the latter two offer an original position on animal ethics and personhood.Kadlac 2015, p. 247. In Part I, Varner offers considerable endorsement of Harean philosophy. Varner interprets Hare as understanding that utilitarianism derives from prescriptivism, and affirms Hare's argument on this point. He goes on to discuss the utility of Intuitive-Level System (ILS) rules;Attfield and Humphreys 2012, p. 494.
1, p. 452. Chmielowski was the outstanding student and critic of literature during Poland's Positivist period. He advocated social utilitarianism in literature, and the realistic treatment of social reality. As a historian he was influenced by the philosophical and esthetic concepts of the French critic Hippolyte Taine, and studied the relations between writers' works and their social and cultural milieux, seeking the expressions of those relations chiefly in the works' ideological concerns.
Alain Caillé in 2008 Allain Caillé (born 1944, Paris) is a French sociologist and economist. He is Professor of sociology at the University of Paris X Nanterre. He is a founding member of the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences (MAUSS) and editor of the movement's monthly journal "Revue du Mauss".Anti-utilitarianism, economics and the gift-paradigm by Alain Caillé, in Revue du MAUSSGIVE IT AWAY By Anthropologist David Graeber, published at www.freewords.
He felt that a state should not be considered an inevitability and instead should be recognized as a construction of the people. He was disappointed in the nature of the state in China at the time, notably the rampant warlordism. The ultimate goal of the state, Gao Yihan thought, should be to secure and protect individual rights. He greatly admired certain philosophies and politics of the west, notably Utilitarianism,Lin 2005, p.
In the Meiji Restoration, English and French civil society was introduced, in particular, utilitarianism and social Darwinism from England, and popular sovereignty of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from France. The thinkers of the early Meiji period advocated the British Enlightenment values derived from Western civil society. They attempted to criticise Japanese traditional authority and feudalism. However they were finally in harmony with the government and accepted the modernization from the above without the radicalness.
It was the 17th Century when the Bridewell was created and had a main focus on inmate training and education. All within this time, the prisons introduced staffing to create a steadier system. As the 18th Century approached, prisoners were forced into hard and manual labor that lasted from morning to dawn. English philosopher Jeremey Bentham introduced a utilitarianism theory to help create more of a moral standard for the treatment and rehabilitation of inmates.
The iPhone 4 and 4S were designed by Jonathan Ive. The '4' generation iPhones differ from earlier Apple designs; the bulges of the back panel as well as the band between the front and back are gone and have been replaced with flattened surfaces. The redesign reflects the utilitarianism and uniformity of existing Apple products, such as the iPad and the iMac. The overall dimensions of the are lower than that of the 3GS.
Although it took a long time to be widely accepted, it would dramatically change subsequent thought and literature. Much of the work of popularizing Darwin's theories was done by his younger contemporary Thomas Henry Huxley, who wrote widely on the subject. A number of other non- fiction works of the era made their mark on the literature of the period. The philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill covered logic, economics, liberty and utilitarianism.
The first half of the 20th century was marked by skepticism toward and neglect of normative ethics. Related subjects, such as social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of history, became only marginal topics of English-language philosophy during this period. During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical type of ethics to remain popular. However, as the influence of logical positivism began to decrease mid-century, analytic philosophers had renewed interest in ethics.
Professor Richard Brandt, a noted proponent of moral utilitarianism, advised Allen's doctoral thesis, "Rights, Children and Education." Her dissertation examined Thomas Hobbes' and John Locke's theories of parental authority, and the moral ideal of a right to education. She argued for greater autonomy for children. Allen was one of the first African-American women to earn a PhD in Philosophy, along with Angela Davis, Joyce Mitchell Cook, LaVerne Shelton, and Adrian Piper.
The story received major changes over the course of development. Garry Schyman, the composer of the first game, returned to create the score for BioShock 2. BioShock 2 takes place eight years after the events of BioShock, with the city having fallen into a dystopia. A new leader, Sofia Lamb, has risen up in the power vacuum after the death of Ryan and Fontaine, and has created a Utilitarianism and Collectivism-type cult of personality.
Narveson was born in Erskine, Minnesota, United States. He studied at the University of Chicago where he obtained a BA in political science and in philosophy; he then spent a year at the University of Oxford on a traveling fellowship before earning a PhD at Harvard University in 1961. His libertarian views have evolved from dissatisfaction with utilitarianism. A prolific author, Narveson has written hundreds of essays, reviews and articles for publication.
Principles can only be derived from other principles. It is therefore of critical importance that liberal perfectionists commit themselves not only to a theory of the good life but also to a theory of distributive justice. Utilitarianism, Egalitarianism, Sufficientarianism and Prioritarianism are the standard candidates when it comes to principles of distribution. For Raz, at the centre of his perfectionist liberalism are autonomy and moral pluralism and the approach can be contrasted with political liberalism.
The antiphilosopher could argue that, with regard to ethics, there is only practical, ordinary reasoning. Therefore, it is wrong to a priori superimpose overarching ideas of what is good for philosophical reasons. For example, it is wrong to blanketly assume that only happiness matters, as in utilitarianism. This is not to say though that some utilitarian-like argument can't be valid when it comes to what is right in some particular case.
In Considerations on Representative Government, he called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, especially proportional representation, the single transferable vote, and the extension of suffrage. In April 1868, he favoured in a Commons debate the retention of capital punishment for such crimes as aggravated murder; he termed its abolition "an effeminacy in the general mind of the country".Sher, George, ed. 2001. Utilitarianism and the 1868 Speech on Capital Punishment, by J. S. Mill.
Perfection means more than—or something different from—happiness or pleasure, and perfectionism is distinct from utilitarianism in all its forms. A society devoted to perfectionist principles may not produce happy citizens—far from it. Kant regarded such a society as government paternalism, which he denied for the sake of a "patriotic" state (imperium non paternale, sed patrioticum). While the individual is responsible for living a virtuous life, the state should be limited to the regulation of human coexistence.
The Theory of Good and Evil is dedicated to Rashdall's teachers, the philosophers Thomas Hill Green and Henry Sidgwick. In the work, Rashdall discusses ethics; Rashdall states that the work is designed mainly to meet the needs of undergraduate philosophy students. Subjects addressed include utilitarianism, the work of the philosopher G. E. Moore, including Principia Ethica, the work of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, and Christian theology. In his second volume, he deals with potential objections to his views.
Within economics, the concept of utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or satisfaction within the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The term has been adapted and reapplied within neoclassical economics, which dominates modern economic theory, as a utility function that represents a consumer's preference ordering over a choice set.
The theory of the modern prison system was born in London, influenced by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's panopticon introduced the principle of observation and control that underpins the design of the modern prison. The notion of prisoners being incarcerated as part of their punishment and not simply as a holding state until trial or hanging, was at the time revolutionary. His views influenced the establishment of the first prisons used as criminal rehabilitation centers.
Utilitarianism is a monist consequentialism. Peña is a pluralist. He is inclined to a pluralistic consequentialism, but his approach can be taken to transcend the very dichotomy, since, once no unique criterion is looked for, actions ought to be assessed in a number of ways according to different values, some of which are not necessarily teleological. Since the approach is gradualistic, ethical valuations are taken to be scales with infinitely many degrees combined in infinitely complex compositions.
John Stuart Mill, developer of Jeremy Bentham's utility-based theory Utilitarianism (from the Latin utilis, useful) is a theory of ethics that prescribes the quantitative maximization of good consequences for a population. It is a form of consequentialism. This good to be maximized is usually happiness, pleasure, or preference satisfaction. Though some utilitarian theories might seek to maximize other consequences, these consequences generally have something to do with the welfare of people (or of people and nonhuman animals).
The maintenance of full and frank disclosure between lawyers and their clients is the main justification for the duty of confidentiality. The basis for this rationale is utilitarianism, in that it works to promote the work of solicitors, who are officers of the court. It allows clients to freely discuss intimate details without fear that such information could be subsequently disclosed to the general public. In turn, public confidence in lawyers and the legal system is maintained and promoted.
Where stadial theory appeared in later authors, the original thrust was distorted. Hopfl has said that the heirs were James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Auguste Comte.Hopfl, p. 32. Hawthorne writes instead of the historical/sociological insights of the Scots being lost in the British context, despite the "tension between a 'natural' account of civil society and a developing sense of the factual importance and moral difficulties of individualism" having become apparent, to utilitarianism and vaguer evolutionism.
1888.) – 9 October 1718) was an English philosopher, and Bishop of Peterborough from 1691. In 1672, he published his major work, De legibus naturae (On natural laws), propounding utilitarianism and opposing the egoistic ethics of Thomas Hobbes. Cumberland was a member of the Latitudinarian movement, along with his friend Hezekiah Burton of Magdalene College, Cambridge and closely allied with the Cambridge Platonists, a group of ecclesiastical philosophers centred on Cambridge University in the mid 17th century.
These perfect duties will thus create liberty and collective freedom within a state. He uses, On Liberty to discuss gender equality in a society. To Mill, Utilitarianism was the perfect tool to justify gender equality in The Subjection of Women, referring to the political, lawful and social subjection of women. When a woman was married, she entered a legally binding coverture with her husband; once she married her legal existence as an individual was suspended under "marital unity" .
Communism remained an important focus especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Colonialism and racism were important issues that arose. In general, there was a marked trend towards a pragmatic approach to political issues, rather than a philosophical one. Much academic debate regarded one or both of two pragmatic topics: how (or whether) to apply utilitarianism to problems of political policy, or how (or whether) to apply economic models (such as rational choice theory) to political issues.
He wrote that Singer's works, including Animal Liberation, "contain little or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical moral conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain and pleasure of all living things as equally significant and that ignores just about everything that has been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals." Tom Regan countered this view of rights by distinguishing moral agents and moral patients.Tom Regan: The Case For Animal Rights.
Within the wide range of ethical traditions, religious traditions co-exist with secular value frameworks such as humanism, utilitarianism, and others. There are many types of religious values. Modern monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity (and to a certain degree others such as Sikhism) define right and wrong by the laws and rules set forth by their respective gods and as interpreted by religious leaders within the respective faith. Polytheistic religious traditions tend to be less absolute.
Philosopher G. H. R. Parkinson notes a common objection to Kant's argument: that what ought to be done does not necessarily entail that it is possible. He also argues that alternative conceptions of morality exist which do not rely on the assumptions that Kant makes – he cites utilitarianism as an example which does not require the summum bonum.Parkinson 1988, p. 344 Nicholas Everitt argues that much moral guidance is unattainable, such as the Biblical command to be Christ-like.
This is Knitter's analog of pure pluralism. All paths may lead to God, and no one can affirm surely that their way is correct. We must all learn from one another, and pull back from making any absolute claims about spiritual matters. As a type of utilitarianism, it takes a subjective approach that admits that various viewpoints may work or not work for the individual, and that is the measure of truth, and any claims beyond that are speculation.
Paper 13. There are many precursors of this train of thought. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, famously wrote in his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789): These arguments have prompted some to suggest that animals' well-being should enter a social welfare function directly, not just indirectly via its effect only on human well-being. Many countries have now formally recognized animal sentience and animal suffering, and have passed anti-cruelty legislation in response.
Nolan's work has often been the subject of extensive social and political commentary. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywood blockbusters can be "precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies". The Dark Knight trilogy explored themes of chaos, terrorism, escalation of violence, financial manipulation, utilitarianism, mass surveillance, and class conflict. Batman's arc of rising (philosophically) from a man to "more than just a man" is similar to the Nietzschian Übermensch.
But Nozick's most famous argument for the side-constraint view against classical utilitarianism and the idea that only felt experience matters is his Experience Machine thought experiment. It induces whatever illusory experience one might wish, but it prevents the subject from doing anything or making contact with anything. There is only pre-programmed neural stimulation sufficient for the illusion. Nozick pumps the intuition that each of us has a reason to avoid plugging into the Experience Machine forever.
Evangelicals and utilitarians shared a basic middle-class ethic of responsibility and formed a political alliance. The result was an irresistible force for reform.On the interactions of Evangelicalism and utilitarianism see Élie Halévy, A History of the English People in 1815 (1924) 585-95; see pp 213–15. Social reforms focused on ending slavery, removing the slavery-like burdens on women and children, and reforming the police to prevent crime, rather than emphasizing the very harsh punishment of criminals.
He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble." However, with intention the situation is more complex. In a footnote printed in the second edition of Utilitarianism, Mill says: "the morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention—that is, upon what the agent wills to do." Elsewhere, he says, "Intention, and motive, are two very different things.
Another way to look at mutual liberty is by accounting for the collective free wills of every rational being in a community. Even though the notion of mutual liberty was introduced by Tocqueville, it was John Stuart Mill who greatly expanded it.John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 12–16. Mill believed that the most proper occasion for mutual liberty was in a community governed by the consent of the governed, i.e.
Natural Theology and the Evidences of Christianity appealed to Victorian Evangelicals, although not so much to adherents of the Oxford Movement – and both found his utilitarianism objectionable. Paley's views influenced (both positively and negatively) theologians, philosophers and scientists, then and since. In addition to Moral and Political Philosophy and the Evidences, Charles Darwin read Natural Theology during his student years, and later stated in his autobiography that he was initially convinced by the argument. His views changed with time.
Positivism reached Britain well after British lead in science was over. British positivism, found in Victorian ethics of utilitarianism, for instance J S Mill's and later in Herbert Spencer's social evolutionism, associated science with moral improvement, but rejected science as political leadership. For Mill, all explanations held the same logical structure—thus, society could be explained by natural laws—yet Mill criticized "scientific politics". From its outset, then, sociology was pulled between moral reform versus administrative policy.
She has also stressed the role that secular philosophical reason has made in moral advances. Increasingly, in her talks and interviews, she has been exploring what she has called "mattering theory" as an alternative to traditional utilitarianism. This theory is a continuation of her idea of "the mattering map", first suggested in her novel The Mind–Body Problem. The concept of the mattering map has been widely adopted in contexts as diverse as cultural criticism, psychology, and behavioral economics.
Altruistic corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate social responsibility (CSR) that goes beyond ethical behavior to voluntarily donate time and/or money towards certain groups of stakeholders, even if the time or money commitment sacrifices part of the business profitability. Altruistic CSR can be viewed as unethical from a business standpoint because it encourages Utilitarianism, a form of philanthropy in which "ethical actions result in the greatest good for the greatest number," as well as going against the theory of Deontology.
The most influential contributors to this theory are considered to be the 18th and 19th-century British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Conjoining hedonism—as a view as to what is good for people—to utilitarianism has the result that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest total amount of happiness (measured via hedonic calculus). Though consistent in their pursuit of happiness, Bentham and Mill's versions of hedonism differ. There are two somewhat basic schools of thought on hedonism.
Discipline was rigorous, tough and uncompromising; punishment was puritanical, austere and harsh. But canes were still used in grammar schools, and contemporaries rather accepted the use of the staff. Hence the advocacy of Transportation to Australia, much in the same way as slaves and indentured servants had made their way to America. Branding of prostitutes and other harsh measures were abandoned when Benthamite Utilitarianism made government think in a more rational, organized way about the role of the State in society.
Although the May Fourth Movement did find partial success in removing traditional Chinese culture, there were still proponents who steadfastly argued that China's traditions and values should be the fundamental foundations of the nation. From these opponents of Western civilization derived three neotraditional schools of thought: national essence, national character, and modern relevance of Confucianism. Each school of thought denounced the western values of individualism, materialism and utilitarianism as inadequate avenues for the development of China. Each school held to specific objectives.
As mentioned above, Hauerwas believes that the moral issue of experimentation on humans cannot be answered from a utilitarianism versus deontological perspective. He believes that society lacks a cohesive understanding of the notions of "the good of mankind" and "the rights of the individual". Only when this issue is solved can society come to a conclusive decision on how science should be used to serve humans needs. Therapeutic and nontherapeutic experimentation on humans are differentiated by the intent of the procedure.
Justin Oakley is a bioethicist and moral philosopher. He has been part of the revival of the ethical doctrine known as virtue ethics, an Aristotelian doctrine which has received renewed interest in the past few decades. Oakley is particularly well known for his work on professional ethics and also the so-called 'problem' of friendship. The problem of friendship looks at how a strict application of impartialist ethical doctrines, such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, conflicts with our notions of friendship or 'true friendship'.
In line with his views on personal identity and the nature of the self, Śāntideva was an advocate of utilitarianism. In what may have been "the very earliest clearly articulated statement of that view, preceding Jeremy Bentham by approximately a thousand years", he wrote that one ought to "stop all the present and future pain and suffering of all sentient beings, and to bring about all present and future pleasure and happiness."Goodman, Charles. 2016. "Śāntideva", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Her success and desire to keep writing drove her to study literature and philosophy in greater depth. An English friend Frances Lewin introduced her to Bentham's Utilitarianism, which liberalized her political views. Bentham's idea of providing "the greatest happiness to the greatest number" also encouraged her to continue devoting her time to her writing instead of nursing. In the autumn 1831, she began taking private lessons from Per Johan Böklin (1796-1867), a reform educator and the principal of a school in Kristianstad.
This work was followed in 1874 by Modern Utilitarianism in which the systems of William Paley, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were examined and compared. In 1876 he delivered the annual address to the Victoria Institute, his subject being The Uncertainties of Modern Physical Science. In 1876 he published his work on Modern Physical Fatalism and the Doctrine of Evolution. It contained the substance of a course of lectures devoted to the examination of the philosophy unfolded in Herbert Spencer's First Principles.
To further sharpen the difference between utilitarianism and prioritarianism, imagine a two-person society: its only members are Jim and Pam. Jim has an extremely high level of well-being, is rich, and lives a blissed-out existence. Pam, by contrast, has an extremely low level of well-being, is in extreme poverty, living a hellish existence. Now imagine that we have some free resources (say, $10,000) that we may distribute to the members of this society as we see fit.
A 2004 article in the Marquette Law Review indicated that negotiating ethics had developed from an individual merely knowing the minimal legal threshold of acceptable behavior, to individuals being more aware that interests can be best understood in a wide perspective of ethical behavioral over the long term.Gibson, Kevin. "Ethics: The New Canon of Negotiation Ethics." Marquette Law Review 87.4 (2004): 746-52 This basis of negotiation introduces not only a moral argument, but also introduces a case for the utilitarianism movement.
One possible reply to this argument is that only a naive interpretation of negative utilitarianism would endorse world destruction. The conclusion can be mitigated by pointing out the importance of cooperation between different value systems. There are good consequentialist reasons why one should be cooperative towards other value systems and it is particularly important to avoid doing something harmful to other value systems. The destruction of the world would strongly violate many other value systems and endorsing it would therefore be uncooperative.
In moral philosophy, Ng advocates for the consequentialist position of hedonistic utilitarianism. He has defended this view in various academic papers, some of which were jointly written with the utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer. He also argues for this position in his 2000 book Efficiency, Equality, and Public Policy. Thanks to his early work on animal welfare, global catastrophic risks and the measurement of wellbeing, he is credited with originating many ideas that would later be incorporated into the philosophy of effective altruism.
The underlying premise Harris takes is one of utilitarianism. He states: > "Questions about Morality are questions about happiness and suffering."page > 8; Letter to a Christian Nation Harris addresses his arguments to members of the conservative Christian Right in America. In answer to their appeal to the Bible on questions of morality, he points to selected items from the Old Testament Mosaic law, (death for adultery, homosexuality, disobedience to parents etc.), and contrasts this with, for example, the complete non-violence of Jainism.
Jeremy Bentham supported his theory with another famous quote of his, that "Nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as determine what we shall do." Bentham's utilitarianism is a hedonistic theory and starts with the premise that people are in their very nature hedonistic. This means that he believed people would actively seek out pleasure and avoid pain, if given the opportunity.
There exists a wide range of philosophical views on humans' obligations or motivations to act altruistically. Proponents of ethical altruism maintain that individuals are morally obligated to act altruistically. The opposing view is ethical egoism, which maintains that moral agents should always act in their own self- interest. Both ethical altruism and ethical egoism contrast with utilitarianism, which maintains that each agent should act in order to maximise the efficacy of their function and the benefit to both themselves and their co-inhabitants.
A rule like promise-keeping is established by looking at the consequences of a world in which people break promises at will and a world in which promises are binding. Right and wrong are the following or breaking of rules that are sanctioned by their utilitarian value. A proposed "middle ground" between these two types is Two-level utilitarianism, where rules are applied in ordinary circumstances, but with an allowance to choose actions outside of such rules when unusual situations call for it.
Sztybel, D. "The Rights of Animal Persons", Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, 4(1), 2006. He is critical of utilitarianism and the traditional feminist ethics of care. He also takes issue with the traditional notion of animal welfare, which supports the use of animals if steps are taken to avoid "unnecessary" suffering, the parameters of which vary. Sztybel argues that we would never call the same treatment of humans, mentally disabled or otherwise, to be consistent with their welfare.
His account, though drawing from all examined traditions, builds primarily upon liberalism and utilitarianism. An Introduction was reviewed positively in several academic publications. The political philosopher Steve Cooke said that Cochrane's own approach showed promise, and that the book would have benefited from devoting more space to it. Robert Garner, a political theorist, praised Cochrane's synthesis of such a broad range of literature, but argued that the work was too uncritical of the concept of justice as it might apply to animals.
Kolnai, > "Morality and Practice II."" Page 105-106. Kolnai was strongly influenced by Max Scheler's value ethics, and he thought that if all things were viewed axiologically, assessed first for value, as opposed to the language of 'ought' or 'must,' then one was provided with "a realm of approbative or disapprobative insights . . . without stressing the unbridgeable gulf between Is and Ought." Thus, > "value ethics precludes the classic pitfalls in Ethics: Hedonism or > Eudemonism; Utilitarianism and Consequentialism of any kind, i.e.
Chicago Review was founded in 1946 by two University of Chicago graduate students, James Radcliffe Squires and Carrolyn Dillard, in response to what they described as "an exaggerated utilitarianism on the college." They aimed to present a "contemporary standard of good writing" and demanded "that the writers do better than they thought they could." Chicago Review exclusively published work by students and faculty members of the university until the Fall/Winter issue of 1953, when F.N. "Chip" Karmtaz assumed editorship of the magazine.
Disraeli's ideas (including his criticism of utilitarianism) found fruit in the "Young England" movement and in writings such as Vindication of the English Constitution (1835), The Radical Tory (1837) and his "social novels" Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845).Viereck, pp. 42–45. A few years later, his one-nation conservatism found new life in the "Tory democracy" of Lord Randolph Churchill and in the early 21st century in the "progressive conservatism" of the Red Tory thesis of British philosopher Phillip Blond.
Instead, Višak suggests, utilitarians should adopt a Prior Existence View, entailing that only the utility of actual beings is taken into account in the judgement of the rightness or wrongness of an action. She rejects the logic of the larder by arguing that beings are not made better off by being brought into existence. Ultimately, then, utilitarianism is not restricted to the avoidance of suffering, and contains the tools to censure the routine killing of nonhuman animals, even in "animal friendly" agriculture.
Thus, Blackburn's theory of quasi-realism provides a coherent account of ethical pluralism. It also answers John Mackie's concerns, presented in his argument from queerness, about the apparently contradictory nature of ethics. Quasi-realism, a meta- ethical approach, enables ethics based on actions, virtues and consequences to be reconciled. Attempts have been made to derive from it a comprehensive theory of ethics, such as Iain King's quasi-utilitarianism in his book How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time (2008).
Boston University, news. Arguably Crisp's most significant work to date is Reasons and the Good (2006), in which he advances some novel approaches to the oldest questions in ethics. The central thesis of this work is that a fundamental issue in normative ethics is what ultimate reasons might underlie our actions; Crisp argues that the best exposition of such reasons will not employ moral concepts. Other major works include a translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and the Routledge Guidebook to Mill on Utilitarianism.
I adhered to it after this discovery, and was rash enough to tell my grandmother that I was a utilitarian." In a letter from 1902, in which Russell criticized utilitarianism, he wrote: "I may as well begin by confessing that for many years it seemed to me perfectly self-evident that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil. Now, however, the opposite seems to me self- evident. This change has been brought about by what I may call moral experience.
Furthermore, Mill asserts that democratic ideals may result in the tyranny of the majority. Among the standards proposed are Mill's three basic liberties of individuals, his three legitimate objections to government intervention, and his two maxims regarding the relationship of the individual to society. On Liberty was a greatly influential and well-received work. Some classical liberals and libertarians have criticized it for its apparent discontinuity with Utilitarianism, and vagueness in defining the arena within which individuals can contest government infringements on their personal freedom of action.
Karl Popper, for example, claimed that "from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure."Popper, Karl. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies 1. Routledge. pp. 284–85. (While Popper is not a consequentialist per se, this is taken as a classic statement of negative utilitarianism.) When considering a theory of justice, negative consequentialists may use a statewide or global- reaching principle: the reduction of suffering (for the disadvantaged) is more valuable than increased pleasure (for the affluent or luxurious).
Within the wide range of moral traditions, religious value systems co-exist with contemporary secular frameworks such as consequentialism, freethought, humanism, utilitarianism, and others. There are many types of religious value systems. Modern monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and to a certain degree others such as Sikhism and Zoroastrianism, define right and wrong by the laws and rules set forth by their respective scriptures and as interpreted by religious leaders within the respective faith. Other religions spanning pantheistic to nontheistic tend to be less absolute.
The Arts Quad in 1919 The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell's original academic buildings and is home to many of the college's programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell's utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. Ezra Cornell's statue, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls.
The Ego and Its Own (; meaningfully translated as The Individual and his Property, literally as The Unique and His Property)A Ready Reference to Philosophy East and West. Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory. is an 1844 work by German philosopher Max Stirner. It presents a post- Hegelian critique of Christianity and traditional morality on one hand; and on the other, humanism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and much of the then- burgeoning socialist movement, advocating instead an amoral (although importantly not inherently immoral or antisocial) egoism.
The Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences) is a French intellectual movement.GIVE IT AWAY By Anthropologist David Graeber, published at www.freewords.org It is based around the ideology of "anti-utilitarianism", a critique of economism in social sciences and instrumental rationalism in moral and political philosophy. The movement was founded in 1981 by sociologist Alain Caillé, with the establishment of its interdisciplinary monthly journal Revue du MAUSSLa revue du M.A.U.S.S. which is still published and edited by Caillé.
His 2002 dissertation, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What to Do About It, argues against moral-realist language and in defense of non-realist utilitarianism as a better framework for resolving disagreements. Greene served as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton in the Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Laboratory before returning to Harvard in 2006 as an assistant professor. In 2011, he became the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences. Since 2014, he has been a Professor of Psychology.
The party's philosophical foundation is "ethno- nationalist utilitarianism", described as maximizing the "greatest happiness for the greatest number of ethnic Danes". This platform is developed in two political pillars. First, an "identitarian" or ethno-nationalist pillar which focuses on protecting and increasing the "ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, and normative homogeneity" of Denmark. Second, a right-libertarian pillar which envisions a radical increase in individual liberty and rights, once the ethnic homogeneity of the country has been "restored" through the banning of Islam and massive deportations.
For Immanuel Kant the reason for adjusting to rules comes in its value as: 'Categorical Imperatives', that contain in itself the reason to be fulfilled. There exist normative ethical systems that do not require principles and rules to be given by a deity. Some include virtue ethics, social contract, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, and Objectivism. Sam Harris has proposed that moral prescription (ethical rule making) is not just an issue to be explored by philosophy, but that we can meaningfully practice a science of morality.
See for example Tranquilist axiology, closely related to negative utilitarianism, states that "an individual experiential moment is as good as it can be for her if and only if she has no craving for change." According to tranquilism, happiness and pleasure have no intrinsic value, only instrumental value. From this perspective, positive experiences superficially appear to have intrinsic value because these experiences substitute for, distract from, or relieve suffering or dissatisfaction that an agent would have otherwise faced in the absence of such experiences.
In 1789, Jeremy Bentham published his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Centred around individual utility and welfare, utilitarianism builds on the notion that any action which increases the overall welfare in society is good, and any action that decreases welfare is bad. By this notion, utilitarianism's focus lies with its outcomes and pay little attention to how these outcomes are shaped. This idea of utilisation maximisation, while being a much broader philosophical consideration, also translates into a theory of justice.
Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites John Rawls's work in A Theory of Justice to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This", she claims, "is altogether different from rhetorical manipulation."Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge.
Mozi is known for his insistence that all people are equally deserving of receiving material benefit and being protected from physical harm. In Mohism, morality is defined not by tradition and ritual, but rather by a constant moral guide that parallels utilitarianism. Tradition varies from culture to culture, and human beings need an extra-traditional guide to identify which traditions are morally acceptable. The moral guide must then promote and encourage social behaviours that maximize the general utility of all the people in that society.
The "happy" utility monster of total utilitarianism is ineffective against maximin, because as soon as a monster has received enough utility to no longer be the worst-off in the group, there's no need to accommodate it. But maximin has its own monster: an unhappy (worst-off) being who only gains a tiny amount of utility no matter how many resources are given to it. It can be shown that all consequentialist systems based on maximizing a global function are subject to utility monsters.
James Henderson Burns, (10 November 1921 – 4 November 2012) was a Scottish historian of medieval and modern political thought who also studied utilitarianism and Jeremy Bentham. He was born in Linlithgow, West Lothian, the son of a manager of a paper mill. He was educated at George Watson's College (1932–40) before attending Edinburgh University, where he was awarded a BA (1st class honours).'James Henderson Burns', The Gifford Lectures website, retrieved 12 January 2020.'Professor J.H. Burns', The Times (18 December 2012), p. 54.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) believed in "the greatest good for the greatest number". Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was perhaps the most radical thinker of his time, and developed the concept of utilitarianism. Bentham was an atheist, a prison reformer, animal rights activist, believer in universal suffrage, freedom of speech, free trade and health insurance at a time when few dared to argue for any of these ideas. He was schooled rigorously from an early age, finishing university and being called to the bar at 18.
He tried to demonstrate the universality of human appetites for corporeal pleasures. He argued that the efforts of self- seeking entrepreneurs are the basis of emerging commercial and industrial society, a line of thought that influenced Adam Smith (1723–1790) and 19th- century Utilitarianism. A tension arose between these two approaches concerning the relative power of norms and interests, the relationship between motives and behaviour, and the historical variability of human cultures.Daniel Luban, "Bernard Mandeville as Moralist and Materialist." History of European Ideas 41.7 (2015): 831–857.
89 Wollaston's idea that science and math could define a morality based on nature predated the scientific morality of Scottish innate or commonsense moral philosophy. Wollaston also held that a person is happy when the sum total of pleasure exceeds pains, anticipating Utilitarianism. Proponents of later schools of philosophy later criticised and sometimes even ridiculed Wollaston, including Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Richard Price, and Jeremy Bentham.Becker Lawrence, and Becker, Charlotte, Encyclopedia of Ethics, Charlotte B. Becker, Volume 3, , 9780415936729, Taylor & Francis US, 2001, p.
It is clear that we do not all value virtues as a path to happiness and that we sometimes only value them for selfish reasons. However, Mill asserts that upon reflection, even when we value virtues for selfish reasons we are in fact cherishing them as a part of our happiness. Bentham's famous formulation of utilitarianism is known as the greatest-happiness principle. It holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest aggregate happiness among all sentient beings, within reason.
He believed the dualism of practical reason might be solved outside of philosophical ethics if it were shown, empirically, that the recommendations of rational egoism and utilitarianism coincided due to the reward of moral behaviour after death. According to Bart Schultz, despite Sidgwick's prominent role in institutionalizing parapsychology as a discipline, he had upon it an “overwhelmingly negative, destructive effect, akin to that of recent debunkers of parapsychology”; he and his Sidgwick Group associates became notable for exposing fraud mediums. One such incident was the exposure of the fraud of Eusapia Palladino.
That is, actually practicing a rule that we must "kill anyone who is less happy than average" would almost certainly cause suffering in the long run. Alternatively, average utilitarianism may be bolstered by a "life worth living" threshold. This threshold would be placed very low (intense suffering) and it is only once a person drops below this threshold that we begin to consider their execution. This obtains the intuition that a generally lower 'average utility' is to be endured provided there are no individuals who would be "better off dead".
He ended up doing many costumes for her in films such as Heartbeat, Mississippi Mermaid, and Love to Eternity. Many of his collections were positively received by both his fans and the press, such as the autumn 1965 collection, which introduced Le Smoking tailored tuxedo suit. Other collections raised controversy, such as his spring 1971 collection, which was inspired by 1940s fashion. Some felt it romanticized the German occupation of France during World War II, which he did not experience, while others felt it brought back the unattractive utilitarianism of the time.
Though Cochrane adopts the principle of equal consideration of interests defended by Peter Singer (pictured, 2012), he rejects the latter's utilitarianism. Sentientist Politics opens with the assumption that some animals are sentient and thus have moral value, and that this has political consequences. It aims to argue that sentient animals (human and nonhuman) have equal moral worth, and this grounds a duty to create a "sentientist cosmopolitan democracy". In the introduction, Cochrane positions the book as a contribution to the political turn in animal ethics that is novel for its cosmpolitanism.
154 Further, > Unfortunately, the promise of this far-sighted undertaking was far from > being fulfilled in its performance. The magnificent opportunity which was > given to the Commissioners to create a beautiful city simply was wasted and > thrown away. ... Thinking only of utility and economy ... in the simplest > and dullest way ... their Plan fell so far short of what might have been > accomplished by men of genius governed by artistic taste. ... [T]hey were > surcharged with the dullness and intense utilitarianism of the people and > the period of which they were a part.
Donald Worster in his book, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, uses Imperial ecology as a counterpoint to Arcadian ecology. Imperial ecology takes a different approach, and suggests that humans should attempt to manage nature, because nature exists for man's benefit (utilitarianism). This contradiction is representative of the ecologists' struggle to explain humanity's relationship with nature while considering popular theological views of the time period. The discussion of Arcadian versus Imperial ecology would continue with prominent figures of the field such as Henry David Thoreau and Charles Darwin.
According to the utilitarian, justice requires the maximization of the total or average welfare across all relevant individuals. This may require sacrifice of some for the good of others, so long as everyone's good is taken impartially into account. Utilitarianism, in general, says that the standard of justification for actions, institutions, or the whole world, is impartial welfare consequentialism, and only indirectly, if at all, to do with rights, property, need, or any other non-utilitarian criterion. These other criteria might be indirectly important, to the extent that human welfare involves them.
Over the course of his career, Rachels wrote 6 books and 85 essays, edited 7 books and gave some 275 professional lectures. He argued for moral vegetarianism and animal rights, affirmative action, euthanasia, and the idea that parents should give as much fundamental moral consideration to another's children as they do to their own. Later in his career, Rachels realized that a lifetime of analysing specific moral issues had led him to adopt the general ethic of utilitarianism, according to which actions are assessed by their effects on both human and nonhuman happiness.
In the Victorian era many aspects of life were succumbing to quantification. The theory of utility soon began to be applied to moral-philosophy discussions. The essential idea in utilitarianism is to judge people's decisions by looking at their change in utils and measure whether they are better off. The main forerunner of the utilitarian principles since the end of the 18th century was Jeremy Bentham, who believed utility could be measured by some complex introspective examination and that it should guide the design of social policies and laws.
Narcoculture is a type of crime-related subculture that emerges in places where traffickers or other mafias have great power, and in consequence great cultural influence. Because of that influence their lives and exploits are often glamorised by the mass media and they are looked up to as role models by some young people. Subcultures similar to Mexican narco culture emerged in the United States during Prohibition, and in Colombia and Italy in the 1990s. These subcultures were characterized by extravagance, ostentation, hedonism, rural roots, honor, prestige, consumerism, power, utilitarianism, religiosity, and violence.
24 and it is noteworthy that Mill is known, in his much-later essay Utilitarianism, for introducing the concept of differences in the quality of pleasures to a previously quantitative 'hedonic calculus' inherited from Jeremy Bentham. In late September, or early October, 1833, Taylor's husband agreed to a trial separation. She went to Paris where, after what appears to have been an initial onset of cold feet regarding the possible repercussions of such a move for his, and her, reputation, Mill joined her.See Mill's letters to Thomas Carlyle, and Taylor's letters to him.
Other groups support not only the anti-abortion cause but the broader family values cause, such as Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, and Concerned Women for America, among many others. Abortion opponents generally believe that human life should be valued either from fertilization or implantation until natural death. The contemporary anti- abortion movement is typically, but not exclusively, influenced by conservative Christian beliefs and has influenced certain strains of bioethical utilitarianism. From that viewpoint, any action which destroys an embryo or fetus kills a person.
In Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Gerald J. Postema states: "No moral concept suffers more at Bentham's hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of the notion." Thus, some critics object, it would be acceptable to torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual. However, as P. J. Kelly argued in Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences.
A 1945 Willys CJ-2A Jeep A first-generation Dodge Power Wagon Willys introduced the model CJ-2A in 1945, the first full-production four-wheel drive vehicle for sale in the general marketplace. Due to the ubiquitous World War II Jeep's success, its rugged utilitarianism set the pattern for many four-wheel drive vehicles to come. Hot on its heels, Dodge also started production of the civilian 4WD Power Wagon trucks, for the 1946 model year. Both the Willys and the Dodge were developed directly from their WW II predecessors.
However, once one adopts that approach, one can take intensities of preferences into consideration, or one can compare (i) gains and losses of utility or (ii) levels of utility, across different individuals. In particular, Harsanyi (1955) gives a justification of utilitarianism (which evaluates alternatives in terms of the sum of individual utilities), originating from Jeremy Bentham. Hammond (1976) gives a justification of the maximin principle (which evaluates alternatives in terms of the utility of the worst-off individual), originating from John Rawls. Not all voting methods use, as input, only an ordering of all candidates.
The book is based upon Cochrane's doctoral thesis, which was completed at the London School of Economics, and builds upon subjects he had discussed in previous publications, including his first book. An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory. It was published by Columbia University Press as the second book in their series Critical Perspectives on Animals, edited by Gary Francione and Gary Steiner. Critics from a variety of backgrounds responded positively to the book, focussing on how Cochrane had found a middle ground between traditional animal rights philosophy and utilitarianism.
Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, is a proponent of the capabilities approach to animal rights. The two main philosophical approaches to animal rights are utilitarian and rights-based. The former is exemplified by Peter Singer, and the latter by Tom Regan and Gary Francione. Their differences reflect a distinction philosophers draw between ethical theories that judge the rightness of an act by its consequences (consequentialism/teleological ethics, or utilitarianism), and those that focus on the principle behind the act, almost regardless of consequences (deontological ethics).
A common recurring theme throughout the manhua is that of ethics. It questions traditional Chinese views on loyalty and touches on the utilitarian and the moral rights models of ethics. Two of the Eight Enigmas, Guo Jia and Jia Xu, as well as Sima Yi and Lü Bu, believed that ending the fighting quickly was the best for the people (a form of negative utilitarianism), regardless of the methods used or how many innocents had to die. As long as the civil war can be ended quickly, it is the best for all the people.
The text presents itself as an unnamed editor's attempt to introduce the British public to Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German philosopher of clothes, who is, in fact, a fictional creation of Carlyle's. The Editor is struck with admiration, but for the most part is confounded by Teufelsdröckh's outlandish philosophy, of which the Editor translates choice selections. To try to make sense of Teufelsdröckh's philosophy, the Editor tries to piece together a biography, but with limited success. Underneath the German philosopher's seemingly ridiculous statements, there are mordant attacks on Utilitarianism and the commercialization of British society.
Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, more a fantasy castle than a hospital, was to be the cause of Lawson's downfall Plan of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum: New Zealand's largest building was completely symmetrical; its external facades belie the utilitarianism of its repetitious interior. Between 1874 and 1884 Lawson worked on the design and construction of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, designed to house five-hundred patients and fifty staff. On its completion it was New Zealand's largest building. Old photographs show a huge, grandiose building loosely in the Gothic style, but with an almost Neuschwanstein quality.
This classic approach included the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. However, some economists gradually began emphasizing the perceived value of a good to the consumer. They proposed a theory that the value of a product was to be explained with differences in utility (usefulness) to the consumer. (In England, economists tended to conceptualize utility in keeping with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and later of John Stuart Mill.) The third step from political economy to economics was the introduction of marginalism and the proposition that economic actors made decisions based on margins.
Dimech adhered to a philosophy that he called ‘of action’, a position very close, though directly unrelated, to the contemporaneous Pragmatism of the United States. He came at this position through his acquaintance with the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and other British Empiricists and philosophers of Utilitarianism. He claimed that actions can be considered right or wrong, and value judgments can be rightly gauged, according to whether they perform well when applied to practice. Actions, he maintained, proceed from the power that knowledge possesses from itself.
Traditional African religions have been extremely influential on African art forms across the continent. African art often stems from the themes of religious symbolism, functionalism and utilitarianism, and many pieces of art are created for spiritual rather than purely creative purposes. Many African cultures emphasize the importance of ancestors as intermediaries between the living, the gods, and the supreme creator, and art is seen as a way to contact these spirits of ancestors. Art may also be used to depict gods, and is valued for its functional purposes.
217 He furthers his argument by stating that utilitarianism causes certain individuals to become specialized in very specific fields and as an effect of such specialization, they end up receiving an incomplete, deformed education. Rodó argues that due to specialization, an individual could be a genius in one aspect of life and completely inept in another. Rodó describes this as the mutilation of the person, because without a general understanding of life through knowledge, the person is no longer complete. The specialization of jobs causes societies to become underdeveloped as opposed to evolving towards maturity.
Rockwell, Llewellyn H., ; Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, Basic Books, 1984, . Hazlitt's major work in philosophy, The Foundations of Morality (1964), a treatise on ethics defending utilitarianism, builds on the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Hazlitt's 1922 work, The Way to Will-Power has been described as a defense of free will; Lew Rockwell characterized it as "a defense of individual initiative against the deterministic claims of Freudian psychoanalysis". In contrast to many other thinkers on the political right, Hazlitt was an agnostic with regard to religious beliefs.
Conservation biologists are interdisciplinary researchers that practice ethics in the biological and social sciences. Chan states that conservationists must advocate for biodiversity and can do so in a scientifically ethical manner by not promoting simultaneous advocacy against other competing values. A conservationist may be inspired by the resource conservation ethic, which seeks to identify what measures will deliver "the greatest good for the greatest number of people for the longest time." In contrast, some conservation biologists argue that nature has an intrinsic value that is independent of anthropocentric usefulness or utilitarianism.
He studied first as an unenrolled student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, attending mostly lectures on mathematics and physics; then architecture in Lviv and Darmstadt, to finally settle for studies in philosophy and classical philology at the University of Lviv. His professors were some of the most esteemed philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of his time: Kazimierz Twardowski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Władysław Witwicki and philologist Stanisław Witkowski. He received his PhD with the thesis Utilitarianism in the Ethics of Mill and Spencer in 1912. After graduation, he taught classical languages at Warsaw's Mikołaj Rey Gymnasium (secondary school).
Retrieved 5 July 2020. should be maximized. Though the seeds of the theory can be found in the hedonists Aristippus and Epicurus, who viewed happiness as the only good, and in the work of the medieval Indian philosopher Śāntideva, the tradition of utilitarianism properly began with Bentham, and has included John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, R. M. Hare, and Peter Singer. The concept has been applied towards social welfare economics, the crisis of global poverty, the ethics of raising animals for food, and the importance of avoiding existential risks to humanity.
Thus, an action that results in the greatest pleasure for the utility of society is the best action, or as Jeremy Bentham, the founder of early Utilitarianism put it, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Mill not only viewed actions as a core part of utility, but as the directive rule of moral human conduct. The rule being that we should only be committing actions that provide pleasure to society. This view of pleasure was hedonistic, as it pursued the thought that pleasure is the highest good in life.
The question, however, is not what we > usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound > moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, > makes a crucial difference to our obligations. Others argue that a moral theory that is so contrary to our deeply held moral convictions must either be rejected or modified. There have been various attempts to modify utilitarianism to escape its seemingly over-demanding requirements. One approach is to drop the demand that utility be maximized.
Richard Mervyn Hare (; 21 March 1919 – 29 January 2002), usually cited as R. M. Hare, was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, the analysis of formal features of moral discourse justifying preference utilitarianism.
In other words, he argued that it made no sense for someone to say, sincerely: "I ought to do X", and then fail to do X. This was identified by Frankena, Nobis and others as a major flaw in Hare's system, as it appeared to take no account of akrasia, or weakness of the will. Hare argued that the combination of universalizability and prescriptivity leads to a certain form of consequentialism, namely, preference utilitarianism. In brief, this means that we should act in such a way as to maximise the satisfaction of people's preferences.
He returned to Toronto and informed Rolph and Morrison that the revolt would begin on December 7. Rolph and Morrison were angry that Mackenzie had deceived them, but ultimately decided to participate in Mackenzie's plan. Mackenzie asked Colonel Anthony Van Egmond to be the military leader of the rebellion. In the November 15, 1837 issue of The Constitution, Mackenzie published a draft constitution modelled on the constitution propounded by the Equal Rights Party (or Locofocos of New York state), but also incorporating English radical Reform ideas and some aspects of utilitarianism.
In addition to research with the Arizona Tewa, Kroskrity has also worked with the Western Mono communities of central California since 1980. In stark contrast to the Arizona Tewa, linguistic purism was absent in the Western Mono communities. Kroskrity identifies three precolonial language ideologies: syncretism, the valorization of linguistic borrowings and hybridity; variationism, that dialectal variation is seen as the natural outcome of family and individual differences; and utilitarianism, the idea of language as tool or technology. These ideologies have most likely contributed to language shift toward English.
Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century", he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control. Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham. He contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on the writings of others, notably William Whewell, John Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Mill by Alexander Bain. He engaged in written debate with Whewell.
When policies are represented as changes in endowments of individuals (transfers or taxes), and utilities of all generations are weighted equally, the social discount rate induced by relative utilitarianism is the growth rate of per capita GDP (2% in the U.S.). This is also consistent with the current practices described in the Circular A-4 of the US Office of Management and Budget, stating: :If your rule will have important intergenerational benefits or costs you might consider a further sensitivity analysis using a lower but positive discount rate in addition to calculating net benefits using discount rates of 3 and 7 percent.
The iPhone 4 is constructed of glass faces and a metal rim. The iPhone 4 features a redesigned structure, designed by Jony Ive, a design that would later be reused and adapted for the iPhone 4S, 5, 5S and first-generation iPhone SE. Most notably, the bulges of the back panel as well as the band between the front and back are gone and have been replaced with flattened surfaces. The redesign reflects the utilitarianism and uniformity of existing Apple products, such as the iPad and the iMac. The overall dimensions of the iPhone 4 have been reduced from its predecessor.
However, others in the field of information ethics argue the practice of censorship is unethical because it fails to provide all available information to the community of readers. British philosopher John Stuart Mill argued censorship is unethical because it goes directly against the moral concept of utilitarianism. Mill believes humans are unable to have true beliefs when information is withheld from the population via censorship and acquiring true beliefs without censorship leads to greater happiness. According to this argument, true beliefs and happiness (of which both concepts are considered ethical) cannot be obtained through the practice of censorship.
Jeremy Bentham, best known for his advocacy of utilitarianism In summary, Jeremy Bentham states that people are driven by their interests and their fears, but their interests take precedence over their fears; their interests are carried out in accordance with how people view the consequences that might be involved with their interests. Happiness, in this account, is defined as the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. It can be argued that the existence of phenomenal consciousness and "qualia" is required for the experience of pleasure or pain to have an ethical significance.Levy, Neil. 2014.
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an early mystery novel which attacks aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s.
In 1949, construction began on the first stage of the Kyiv Metro, which opened in 1960. All of the stations there are considered as monuments of architecture, due to their unique authentic character, that latter stations of the 1960s would lose in face of changing policy towards utilitarianism. In 1967, construction began on the first stage of the Kharkiv Metro, which opened in 1975, this was soon joined by the semi-Metro Kryvyi Rih Metrotram in 1986 and the Dnipro Metro in 1995. Stations built in these systems, like most others in the former Soviet Union, have.
In the 18th century, utilitarianism gave insight into the utility-maximizing versions of rationality, however, economists still have no single definition or understanding of what preferences and rational actors should be analyzed by. Since the pioneer efforts of Frisch in the 1920s, one of the major issues which has pervaded the theory of preferences is the representability of a preference structure with a real-valued function. This has been achieved by mapping it to the mathematical index called utility. Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944 book "Games and Economic Behaviour" treated preferences as a formal relation whose properties can be stated axiomatically.
They developed systems of mass incarceration, often with hard labor, as a solution. The prison reform movement that arose at this time was heavily influenced by two somewhat contradictory philosophies. The first was based in Enlightenment ideas of utilitarianism and rationalism, and suggested that prisons should simply be used as a more effective substitute for public corporal punishments such as whipping, hanging, etc. This theory, referred to as deterrence, claims that the primary purpose of prisons is to be so harsh and terrifying that they deter people from committing crimes out of fear of going to prison.
Kant, theist (disputably Christian) On ethics, Kant wrote works that both described the nature of universal principles and also sought to demonstrate the procedure of their application. Kant maintained that only a "good will" is morally praiseworthy, so that doing what appears to be ethical for the wrong reasons is not a morally good act. Kant's emphasis on one's intent or reasons for acting is usually contrasted with the utilitarian tenet that the goodness of an action is to be judged solely by its results. Utilitarianism is a hypothetical imperative, if one wants _____, they must do ______.
Michael A. Slote is UST Professor of ethics at the University of Miami and an author of a number of books. He was previously professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, and at Trinity College Dublin. He argues that virtue ethics, in a particular form which draws on the concept of an ethics of care, offers significant intuitive and structural advantages over deontology, utilitarianism, and common-sense morality. He has also recently endorsed the meta-ethical view of moral sentimentalism in opposition to moral rationalism (see his articles from 2003, 2004, 2005a and his books (2007 and 2010)).
The theory of utilitarianism and the concept of greater good is most often used as a rationale for animal research in comparative medicine and elsewhere. The basic idea is that the actions that produce the greatest good for the greatest number are moral actions, meaning that new drugs and therapies along with the decreased suffering of humans and animals justifies the use of some animals in research. There are concerns that animal experimentation that has no translational benefit or reproducibility is likely unethical. There are philosophers that believe that animal testing violates an animal's dignity and is ethically wrong.
196-224 as well as conflict with common philosophical intuition. In one such feature of his philosophy, Singer argues that fetuses and even newborn humans are not yet persons and do not, therefore, have the same rights as an adult human or any other person. Thus the right to life does not apply to fetuses according to Singer's preference utilitarianism as a non- person can not have preferences (see Singer on abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide). On the other hand, Michael Tooley distinguished between creatures that only have the possibility of becoming a person as he defined it (e.g.
This question had first attracted him to the utilitarians, and he found at the core of their answer a fundamental contradiction. Utilitarianism, he said, was based on two principles: first, that the science of the legislator must bring together the naturally divergent interests of individuals in society; and, second, that social order comes about spontaneously through the harmony of individual interests. To Halévy, this exemplified two fundamental human attitudes toward the universe: the contemplation of the astronomer and the intervention of the engineer. In 1892, Émile Boutmy invited Halévy to lecture on English political ideas at the newly founded School of Political Science.
Bringing Pam up by 86 has more moral value than bringing Jim down by 87 if a sufficiently higher weight is given to improvements in condition for the worst off (Pam), but if the added weight is small (very weak priority), that might not be the case. If one could move from a society described by outcome 1 to one described by outcome 2, under sufficiently strong prioritarianism, that ought to be done. Prioritarianism is arguably more consistent with commonsense moral thinking than utilitarianism when it comes to these kinds of cases, especially because of the prioritarian's emphasis on compassion.
A. Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (London: Crown Publishing Group, 2001), . Key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment who had made their mark before the mid-eighteenth century included Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1729 to 1746. He was an important link between the ideas of Shaftesbury and the later school of Scottish Common Sense Realism, developing Utilitarianism and Consequentialist thinking. Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746), appointed to a chair of mathematics by the age of 19 at Marischal College, was the leading British mathematician of his era.
Katō Hiroyuki threw away natural rights under influence of social Darwinism, and instead advocated the survival of the fittest. Fukuzawa Yukichi, who introduced British utilitarianism to Japan and advocated natural rights, assumed that human rights were given by Heaven. He considered the development of the civilization to be the development of the human spirit, and it was assumed that one's independence led to independence of one country.Encouragement of learning (1872–76) and An outline of a theory of civilization (1875) Fukuzawa thought that government is for the "sake of convenience", and its appearance should be suitable to the culture.
But still the utility has some weight in the sense that if the disutilities are the same in the alternatives, and hence we cannot minimise the disutility any further, then we ought to maximise the utility. Depending on what kinds of disutilities we choose in establishing this order, we get different lexical negativisms." 'Lexical threshold' negative utilitarianism says that there is some disutility, for instance some extreme suffering, such that no positive utility can counterbalance it.: "Lexical Threshold NU Suffering and happiness both count, but there is some amount of suffering that no amount of happiness can outweigh.
Though earlier utilitarians like William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill had sketched versions of utilitarian ethics, Sidgwick was the first theorist to develop the theory in detail and to investigate how it relates both to other popular ethical theories and to conventional morality. His efforts to show that utilitarianism is substantially compatible with common moral values helped to popularize utilitarian ethics in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The careful, painstaking, and detailed way Sidgwick discusses moral problems was an important influence on G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and other founders of Anglo-American analytic philosophy.
Rain Without Thunder and the views depicted within have been criticised by those within the animal movement. One criticism is that Francione depicts a purist ideal and does not care for incremental approaches to animal welfare, but wants the end of animal use now and is not interested in discussing the practicality or methodology to make this happen. Francione heavily criticises utilitarianism, particularly through its main modern proponent, Peter Singer. The book is criticised, however, for not stepping into the active debate between consequentialism and deontology, instead taking it for granted that deontology and a rights approach are correct.
One approach which attempts to overcome the seemingly impossible divide between deontology and utilitarianism (of which the divide is caused by the opposite takings of an absolute and relativist moral view) is case-based reasoning, also known as casuistry. Casuistry does not begin with theory, rather it starts with the immediate facts of a real and concrete case. While casuistry makes use of ethical theory, it does not view ethical theory as the most important feature of moral reasoning. Casuists, like Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (The Abuse of Casuistry 1988), challenge the traditional paradigm of applied ethics.
William Thompson (1775 – 28 March 1833) was an Irish political and philosophical writer and social reformer, developing from utilitarianism into an early critic of capitalist exploitation whose ideas influenced the cooperative, trade union and Chartist movements as well as Karl Marx. Born into the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy of wealthy landowners and merchants of Cork society, his attempt to will his estate to the cooperative movement after his death sparked a long court case as his family fought successfully to have the will annulled.Fintan Lane, "William Thompson, bankruptcy and the west Cork estate, 1808-1834", in Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxxix, no.
Between §62 and §186 Nietzsche inserts a collection of mostly single-sentence aphorisms, modelled on French aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld. Twelve of these (§§ 84, 85, 86, 114, 115, 127, 131, 139, 144, 145, 147, 148) concern women or the distinction between men and women. Other subjects touched on include his doctrine of the eternal recurrence (§70), music (§106) and utilitarianism (§174), among more general attempts at trenchant observations about human nature. The work concludes with a short ode to friendship in verse form (continuing Nietzsche's use of poetry in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
State consequentialism, also known as Mohist consequentialism, is an ethical theory that evaluates the moral worth of an action based on how much it contributes to the basic goods of a state. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Mohist consequentialism, dating back to the 5th century BC, as "a remarkably sophisticated version based on a plurality of intrinsic goods taken as constitutive of human welfare".Fraser, Chris, "Mohism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta. Unlike utilitarianism, which views pleasure as a moral good, "the basic goods in Mohist consequentialist thinking are ... order, material wealth, and increase in population".
Guyau's works primarily analyze and respond to modern philosophy, especially moral philosophy. Largely seen as an Epicurean, he viewed English utilitarianism as a modern version of Epicureanism. Although an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he did not spare them a careful scrutiny of their approach to morality. In his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, probably his most important work on moral theory, he begins from Fouillée, maintaining that utilitarian and positivist schools, despite admitting the presence of an unknowable in moral theory, wrongly expel individual hypotheses directed towards this unknowable.
Scruton writes, "These "dilemmas" have the useful character of eliminating from the situation just about every morally relevant relationship and reducing the problem to one of arithmetic alone." Scruton believes that just because one would choose to change the track so that the train hits the one person instead of the five does not mean that they are necessarily a Consequentialist. As a way of showing the flaws in consequentialist responses to ethical problems, Scruton points out paradoxical elements of belief in utilitarianism and similar beliefs. He believes that Nozick's experience machine thought experiment definitively disproves hedonism.
Useful ethical approaches to guide the development of such triaging protocols are often based on the principles of the theories of utilitarianism, egalitarianism and proceduralism. Utilitarian Approach The Utilitarian theory works on the premise that the responder shall 'maximise collective welfare'; or in other words, 'do the greatest good for the greatest numbers of people'. The utilitarian will necessarily need a measure by which to assess the outcome of the intervention. This could be thought of through various ways, for instance: the number of lives saved, or the number of years of life saved through the intervention.
An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory is a 2010 textbook by the British political theorist Alasdair Cochrane. It is the first book in the publisher Palgrave Macmillan's Animal Ethics Series, edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn. Cochrane's book examines five schools of political theory—utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism and feminism—and their respective relationships with questions concerning animal rights and the political status of (non-human) animals. Cochrane concludes that each tradition has something to offer to these issues, but ultimately presents his own account of interest-based animal rights as preferable to any.
32 The central concept of utilitarianism, which was developed by Jeremy Bentham, was that public policy should seek to provide "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". While this could be interpreted as a justification for state action to reduce poverty, it was used by classical liberals to justify inaction with the argument that the net benefit to all individuals would be higher. His philosophy proved to be extremely influential on government policy and led to increased Benthamite attempts at government social control, including Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police, prison reforms, the workhouses and asylums for the mentally ill.
Born in Kensington, London, on 24 June 1858, Rashdall was the son of an Anglican priest. He was educated at Harrow and received a scholarship for New College, Oxford. After short tenures at St David's University College and University College, Durham, Rashdall was made a Fellow of first Hertford College, Oxford, then New College, Oxford, and dedicates his main work, The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), to the memory of his teachers T. H. Green and Henry Sidgwick. The dedication is appropriate, for the particular version of utilitarianism put forward by Rashdall owes elements to both Green and Sidgwick.
Gay's philosophical works argued that virtue was conforming to a rule of life which promotes the happiness of others. His short "Dissertation concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality" was first published as a preface to Edmund Law's translation of William King's Latin Essay on the Origin of Evil (1731). (Law was Bishop of Carlisle and King was Archbishop of Dublin.) The "Dissertation" is one of the seminal works in the history of English utilitarianism. In the eighteenth century its influence may be found in the works of the theological utilitarians, Abraham Tucker (The Light of Nature Pursued, 7 vols.
Norman Geras's Marx and Human Nature (1983), however, offers an argument against this position.See in particular Chapter Two In outline, Geras shows that, while the social relations are held to 'determine' the nature of people, they are not the only such determinant. However, Marx makes statements where he specifically refers to a human nature which is more than what is conditioned by the circumstances of one's life. In Capital, in a footnote critiquing utilitarianism, he says that utilitarians must reckon with 'human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch'.
In Satisficing Consequentialism, Michael Slote argues for a form of utilitarianism where "an act might qualify as morally right through having good enough consequences, even though better consequences could have been produced." One advantage of such a system is that it would be able to accommodate the notion of supererogatory actions. Samuel Scheffler takes a different approach and amends the requirement that everyone be treated the same. In particular, Scheffler suggests that there is an "agent-centered prerogative" such that when the overall utility is being calculated it is permitted to count our own interests more heavily than the interests of others.
Utilitarianism's assertion that well-being is the only thing with intrinsic moral value has been attacked by various critics. Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, criticises Bentham's utilitarianism on the grounds that it does not appear to recognise that people have different joys in different socioeconomic contexts:Das Kapital Volume 1, Chapter 24, endnote 50 > With the driest naivete he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the > English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer > normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, > he applies to past, present, and future.
174 (last paragraph of this excerpt). And in a footnote in the actual book, Singer writes "My change of mind about mollusks stems from conversations with R.I. Sikora." This view still might be contrasted with deep ecology, which holds that an intrinsic value is attached to all forms of life and nature, whether currently assumed to be sentient or not. According to utilitarianism, the forms of life that are unable to experience anything akin to either enjoyment or discomfort are denied moral status, because it is impossible to increase the happiness or reduce the suffering of something that cannot feel happiness or suffer.
Consequentialism is a collection of ethical theories which judge the rightness or wrongness of an action on its consequences; if the actions brings more benefit than harm, it is good, if it brings more harm than benefit, it is bad. The most well-known type of consequentialism theory is utilitarianism. The publication of Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation, in 1975, gathered sizeable traction and provided him with a platform to speak his mind on the issues of animal rights. Due to the attention Singer received, his views were the most accessible, and therefore best known by the public.
It has been described as Żuławski's take on the philosophy of history and interpreted as a critique of a socialist, egalitarian utopia. Żuławski's story shows the unpredictability of human nature as victorious over the concepts of utilitarianism and social regulation. He is critical of religion, arguing that they are a social construct that can have destructive influence on humanity. He is also concerned with the political uses of scientific knowledge, and is critical of the pursuit of "pure science", and is also critical of the notion of technological progress, which Żuławski sees as leading to greater conflict and inequality.
David Hume, on the other hand, took empiricist skepticism to its extremes, and he was the most radically empiricist philosopher of the period. He attacked surmise and unexamined premises wherever he found them, and his skepticism pointed out metaphysics in areas that other empiricists had assumed were material. Hume doggedly refused to enter into questions of his personal faith in the divine, but he assaulted the logic and assumptions of theodicy and cosmogeny, and he concentrated on the provable and empirical in a way that would lead to utilitarianism and naturalism later. In social and political philosophy, economics underlies much of the debate.
He argued that the efforts of self-seeking entrepreneurs are the basis of emerging commercial and industrial society, a line of thought that influenced Adam Smith (1723–1790) and 19th century utilitarianism. The tension between these two approaches modes ambivalences and contradictions—concerning the relative power of norms and interests, the relationship between motives and behaviours, and the historical variability of human cultures. In the Enlightenment of the 18th century, discussions of hypocrisy were common in the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montaigne. In the 1750 to 1850 era, Whig aristocrats in England boasted of their special benevolence for the common people.
Shaw claimed that the Republic of Turkey, as a neutral during the greater part of World War II, exerted its diplomatic efforts to the best of its abilities to save Jews of Turkish origins from extermination. The work was particularly receptive among Turkish government circles. It was, however, severely criticized by Bernard Wasserstein in The Times Literary Supplement for factual and methodological errors. Shaw's points have been challenged in a more recent study by Corry Guttstadt, who contests that his work has contributed to "an ossified, self-perpetuating myth [of Turkish utilitarianism] which is frequently propagated in international publications,"Guttstadt, Corry.
Varner 2012. Varner had been working on questions about R. M. Hare and animals since 2001, when he taught a graduate class exploring the subject; given that Peter Singer was a student of Hare, Varner was interested in exploring whether Hare's philosophy endorsed Singer's conclusions about animal liberation.Varner 2012, pp. xi–xii. A project entitled Harey Animals: Situating Animals in the Two-Level Utilitarianism of R. M. Hare was submitted to Oxford University Press, but this was subsequently split into two books; Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition was the first, while the second, the forthcoming Sustaining Animals: Envisioning Humane, Sustainable Communities, in under contract with the publisher.
Although his theory did not receive significant attention in the 19th Century, it has since become central to the jurisprudential canon, and has been criticised, adapted and enlarged upon by subsequent jurists such as H. L. A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. Austin was a student of Jeremy Bentham, and as such subscribed to Utilitarianism. He adopted this perspective in his understanding of law, and argued that all laws should work toward promoting the greatest good for the greatest number of people. According to Austin, a law is 'a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him.
Protected values have been found to be play a role in protracted conflicts (e.g., the Israeli- Palestinian conflict) because they can hinder businesslike (utilitarian) negotiations. A series of experimental studies directed by Scott Atran and Ángel Gómez among combatants on the ISIS frontline in Iraq and with ordinary citizens in Western Europe suggest that commitment to sacred values motivate the most "devoted actors" to make the costliest sacrifices, including willingness to fight and die, as well as a readiness to forsake close kin and comrades for those values if necessary. From the perspective of utilitarianism, protected values are biases when they prevent utility from being maximized across individuals.
Situational ethics is a form of consequentialism (though distinct from utilitarianism in that the latter's aim is "the greatest good for the greatest number") that focuses on creating the greatest amount of love. Situational ethics can also be classed under the ethical theory genre of "proportionalism" which says that "It is never right to go against a principle unless there is a proportionate reason which would justify it."Hoose, 1987 J. A. T. Robinson, a situational ethicist, considered the approach to be a form of ethical relativism. There was an active debate in the mid-twentieth century around situational ethics, which was being promoted by a number of primarily Protestant theologians.
Mora attacked corporate privilege, especially the fueros of the Roman Catholic Church; considered the role of utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) in Mexico; examined the so-called "Indian Question," of how to modernize Mexico when the majority of the population was indigenous living in rural communities; and considered the role of liberalism in economic development.Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853. New Haven: Yale University Press 1968. The early post- independence era was dominated by General Antonio López de Santa Anna and Mexican conservatives, so that Mexican liberals were rarely able to exercise political power nationally.
Many consequentialist theories may seem primarily concerned with human beings and their relationships with other human beings. However, some philosophers argue that we should not limit our ethical consideration to the interests of human beings alone. Jeremy Bentham, who is regarded as the founder of utilitarianism, argues that animals can experience pleasure and pain, thus demanding that 'non-human animals' should be a serious object of moral concern. More recently, Peter Singer has argued that it is unreasonable that we do not give equal consideration to the interests of animals as to those of human beings when we choose the way we are to treat them.
One way to divide various consequentialisms is by the types of consequences that are taken to matter most, that is, which consequences count as good states of affairs. According to utilitarianism, a good action is one that results in an increase in pleasure, and the best action is one that results in the most pleasure for the greatest number. Closely related is eudaimonic consequentialism, according to which a full, flourishing life, which may or may not be the same as enjoying a great deal of pleasure, is the ultimate aim. Similarly, one might adopt an aesthetic consequentialism, in which the ultimate aim is to produce beauty.
The broad spectrum of consequentialist ethics—of which utilitarianism is a well-known example—focuses on the end result or consequences, with such principles as John Stuart Mill's 'principle of utility': "the greatest good for the greatest number." This principle is thus teleological, though in a broader sense than is elsewhere understood in philosophy. In the classical notion, teleology is grounded in the inherent nature of things themselves, whereas in consequentialism, teleology is imposed on nature from outside by the human will. Consequentialist theories justify inherently what most people would call evil acts by their desirable outcomes, if the good of the outcome outweighs the bad of the act.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Chapter 1, p. 10. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, wrote in the final paragraph of the book: > Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to > see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only > from all social but also from all temporal points of view.A Theory of > Justice by John Rawls. 2005. Harvard University Press, p. 587 Bernard Williams, in Utilitarianism: For and Against, wrote: > Philosophers... repeatedly urge us to view the world sub specie > aeternitatis, but for most human purposes that is not a good species to view > it under.
According to Hughes, the ideology "stems from the assertion that human beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and social forces that control their lives." The ethical foundation of democratic transhumanism rests upon rule utilitarianism and non-anthropocentric personhood theory. Democratic transhumanist support equal access to human enhancement technologies in order to promote social equality and to prevent technologies from furthering the divide among the socioeconomic classes. While raising objections both to right-wing and left-wing bioconservatism, and libertarian transhumanism, Hughes aims to encourage democratic transhumanists and their potential progressive allies to unite as a new social movement and influence biopolitical public policy.
Slum clearance brought about a fall in the death rate, but the lack of new inexpensive housing led to other poor districts becoming more overcrowded and degenerating into slums. The experience demonstrated to reformers that future projects had to include cheap new housing.P. J. Smith, "Slum Clearance as an Instrument of Sanitary Reform: The Flawed Vision of Edinburgh's First Slum Clearance Scheme," Planning Perspectives(1994) 9#1 pp 1–27 In the intellectual sphere, from 1832 to 1844, Chambers's Edinburgh Journal was the most read periodical in Britain, with a circulation over 80,000. Edited by the Chambers brothers, Robert and William, it applied the philosophy of utilitarianism to practical issues.
The locomotive's carbody lacked the full- length walkways of a true switch engine (a mistake not repeated on the subsequent "GP" series of diesels or other road switchers), making it difficult for the brakeman or switchman to move from one point on the locomotive to another during switching operations. Finally, although the industrial designers at EMD tried to build a carbody that evoked high-class passenger trains while retaining the utilitarianism of railroad work, the design never became popular. Even though the BL2 wasn't very successful, EMD's engineers learned from the endeavor, and incorporated all of the good ideas from it into the company's successful GP series of locomotives.
Taking Benjamin Franklin as an example, Haidt looks at how success can follow virtue, in the broad sense of virtue that goes back to the Ancient Greek arete, excellence. The ancients, according to Haidt, had a sophisticated psychological understanding of virtue, using maxims, fables and role-models to train "the elephant," the automatic responses of the individual. Though the beginnings of Western virtue lie in Homer, Aesop and the Old Testament, the modern understanding of it has much to do with the arguments of Kant (the categorical imperative) and Bentham (utilitarianism). With these came a shift from character ethics to quandary ethics, from moral education to moral reasoning.
He began with metaphysics, specifically "the philosophical foundation of knowledge, especially in relation to theology.".Keynes, 1924 Metaphysics led Marshall to ethics, specifically a Sidgwickian version of utilitarianism; ethics, in turn, led him to economics, because economics played an essential role in providing the preconditions for the improvement of the working class. He saw that the duty of economics was to improve material conditions, but such improvement would occur, Marshall believed, only in connection with social and political forces. His interest in Georgism, liberalism, socialism, trade unions, women's education, poverty and progress reflect the influence of his early social philosophy on his later activities and writings.
In a series of books, R.M. Hare (who introduced the term into philosophical literatureHare 1981, pp.80-81) made moral supervenience the basis of his derivation of a version of utilitarianism, but this was actually a universal applicability condition combined with the criterion that the universalized behavior would not produce a greater balance of satisfied over frustrated preferences of all affected agents (including animal agents as well as persons) than any alternative behavior would.Hare, 1963Hare, 1981 Other act consequentialists also use versions of this argument, often expressing this in terms of the golden rule or the universality of reasons, where this is described as a universal applicability condition.Moore, 1903, pp.
This is a version of utilitarianism. Nor does it look merely to the lower pleasures, the pleasures of sense, for the constituents of good, but rises above them to include especially what tends to perfect, strengthen and expand our true nature. Existence and the extension of our powers of body and mind are held to be good for their own sakes without respect to enjoyment. Cumberland's views on this point were long abandoned by utilitarians as destroying the homogeneity and self-consistency of their theory; but John Stuart Mill and some other writers have reproduced them as necessary to its defence against charges not less serious than even inconsistency.
The term "negative utilitarianism" was introduced by R. N. Smart in his 1958 reply to Karl Popper's bookK. Popper, "Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1. Routledge. pp. 284–285. The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945.: "Professor Popper has proposed a negative formulation of the utilitarian principle, so that we should replace ‘Aim at the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number’ by ‘The least amount of avoidable suffering for all’. He says: ‘It adds to the clarity of ethics if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of happiness’.
It takes the form of a perpetually lighted beacon to honor the state's dead from World War I (and subsequent conflicts). The light was at the time the strongest beacon in Massachusetts, with a nighttime visible range of up to 70 miles. The architectural design of the tower, a tall shaft with eight frieze- framed observation openings, was intended to have no suggestion of Utilitarianism but instead to display classic austerity. It includes some minor Art Deco details such as the decorative eagle on the base which were designed in part by John Bizzozero of Quincy, Massachusetts [Bizzozero also designed details on the Vermont Capitol building].
Jeremy Bentham: "The time will come, when humanity will extend its mantle over every thing which breathes."Bentham (1781), Part III. Four years later, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although opposed to the concept of natural rights, argued that it was the ability to suffer that should be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. Bentham states that the capacity for suffering gives the right to equal consideration; equal consideration is that the interests of any being affected by an action are to be considered and have the equal interest of any other being.
The use of an applied ethics approach often draws upon certain normative ethical theories like the following: # Utilitarianism, where the practical consequences of various policies are evaluated on the assumption that the right policy will be the one which results in the greatest happiness. This theory's main developments came from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who distinguished between an act and rule utilitarianist morality. Later developments have also adjusted the theory, most notably Henry Sidgwick who introduced the idea of motive or intent in morality, and Peter Singer who introduced the idea of preference in moral decision making. # Deontological ethics, notions based on 'rules' i.e.
The central conflict is built on several dichotomies: between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the technocratic Northern Europe and underdeveloped Mediterranean region, and the rationalist idealism of Postchristianity and materialist philosophy of ancient Greece. The film ridicules the idealist notion of progress and celebrates the Dionysian world. It portrays an empty spirituality produced by a bureaucratic utilitarianism, and thereby seeks to justify the celebration of a material world imbued with spirit. When Étienne converses with a Christian priest, the two are shown to have disagreements, but to simultaneously understand each other well; this is because both still belong to the idealist side in the film's conflict.
Jeremy Bentham John Stuart Mill Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that argues the proper course of action is one that maximizes a positive effect, such as "happiness", "welfare", or the ability to live according to personal preferences. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are influential proponents of this school of thought. In A Fragment on Government Bentham says 'it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong' and describes this as a fundamental axiom. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation he talks of 'the principle of utility' but later prefers "the greatest happiness principle".
Unlike hedonistic utilitarianism, which views pleasure as a moral good, "the basic goods in Mohist consequentialist thinking are... order, material wealth, and increase in population". During Mozi's era, war and famines were common, and population growth was seen as a moral necessity for a harmonious society. The "material wealth" of Mohist consequentialism refers to basic needs like shelter and clothing. Stanford sinologist David Shepherd Nivison, in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, writes that the moral goods of Mohism "are interrelated: more basic wealth, then more reproduction; more people, then more production and wealth... if people have plenty, they would be good, filial, kind, and so on unproblematically".
Trolley problems have been used as a measure of utilitarianism, but their usefulness for such purposes has been widely criticized. In 2017, a group led by Michael Stevens performed the first realistic trolley-problem experiment, where subjects were placed alone in what they thought was a train-switching station, and shown footage which they thought was real (but was actually pre- recorded) of a train going down a track, with five workers on the main track, and one on the secondary track; the participants had the option to pull the lever to divert the train toward the secondary track. Most of the participants did not pull the lever.
Like the ASNOVA group, OSA grew out of the avant-garde wing of the VKhUTEMAS school in Moscow. The group's founders were Moisei Ginzburg, well known for his book Style and Epoch (a Soviet response to Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture) and the painter, designer and architect Alexander Vesnin. Unlike the earlier association the OSA group claimed for itself the name Constructivist, in that it was, in its utilitarianism and concentration on function rather than form, an architectural equivalent to the experiments of 'artistic' Constructivism. OSA was in many ways the architectural wing of the socialist Modernists of LEF, and likewise set up its own journal in 1926.
Respectability was their code—a businessman had to be trusted and must avoid reckless gambling and heavy drinking. Second, the spiritual reform closely linked to evangelical Christianity, including both the Nonconformist sects, such as the Methodists, and especially the evangelical or Low Church element in the established Church of England, typified by Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885).On the interactions of Evangelicalism and utilitarianism see Élie Halévy, A History of the English People in 1815 (1924) 585-95; also 3:213-15. It imposed fresh moralistic values on society, such as Sabbath observance, responsibility, widespread charity, discipline in the home, and self- examination for the smallest faults and needs of improvement.
Finally, it can also be claimed that we should have dispositions in our character to behave as suffering reducers. Adams, Carol J. (1996) "Caring about Suffering: A Feminist Exploration", in Donovan, Josephine & Adams, Carol J. (eds.), Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, Continuum, New York, 1996, pp. 170–196. Suffering-focused ethics used to be named as "negative", as they consider that the reduction of what is negative is more important than the promotion of what has positive value.Acton, H. B. & Watkins, J. W. N. (1963) "Symposium: Negative utilitarianism", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 37, pp. 83-114.
The importance of happiness as an end for humans has long been recognized. Forms of hedonism were put forward by Aristippus and Epicurus; Aristotle argued that eudaimonia is the highest human good; and Augustine wrote that "all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness." Happiness was also explored in depth by Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica.. Meanwhile, in medieval India, the 8th Century Indian philosopher Śāntideva was one of the earliest proponents of utilitarianism, writing that we ought "to stop all the present and future pain and suffering of all sentient beings, and to bring about all present and future pleasure and happiness."Goodman, Charles. 2016.
Practical idealism is a term first used by John Dewey in 1917 and subsequently adopted by Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Marg 2002). It describes a philosophy that holds it to be an ethical imperative to implement ideals of virtue or good. It further holds it to be equally immoral to either refuse to make the compromises necessary to realise high ideals, or to discard ideals in the name of expediency. Practical idealism in its broadest sense may be compared to utilitarianism in its emphasis on outcomes, and to political economy and enlightened self-interest in its emphasis on the alignment of what is right with what is possible.
Hare was greatly influenced by the emotivism of A. J. Ayer and Charles L. Stevenson, the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, a certain reading of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, utilitarianism, and Immanuel Kant. Hare held that ethical rules should not be based on a principle of utility, though he took into account utilitarian considerations. His hybrid approach to meta-ethics distinguishes him from classical utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham. His book Sorting Out Ethics might be interpreted as saying that Hare is as much a Kantian as he is a utilitarian, but other sources"What Kant Might Say to Hare" disagree with this assessment.
His essay emphasised the nihilistic sources of the intelligentsia's utilitarianism: material progress and national education were always viewed as a means to another end. Moreover, he saw Russian Marxists as obsessed by a populist drive to perfect society through redistribution and faulted them for their penchant for dividing all humanity into friends and enemies. Gershenzon asserted, in the book's most controversial sentence, that "so far from dreaming of union with the people we ought to fear the people and bless this government which, with its prisons and bayonets, still protects us from the people's fury". The essays suggested that Russia had reached a milestone and was ready for turning.
A Theory of Justice is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls, in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society). The theory uses an updated form of Kantian philosophy and a variant form of conventional social contract theory. Rawls's theory of justice is fully a political theory of justice as opposed to other forms of justice discussed in other disciplines and contexts. The resultant theory was challenged and refined several times in the decades following its original publication in 1971.
The earliest moral issue associated with autonomous driving can be dated back to as early as the age of the trolleys. The trolley problem is one of the most well-known ethical issues. Introduced by English philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, the trolley problem asks that under a situation which the trolley’s brake does not work, and there are five people ahead of the trolley, the driver may go straight, killing the five persons ahead, or turn to the side track killing the one pedestrian, what should the driver do ? Before the development of autonomous vehicles, the trolley problem remains an ethical dilemma between utilitarianism and deontological ethics.
According to the ethical objectivist, the truth or falsehood of typical moral judgments does not depend upon the beliefs or feelings of any person or group of persons. This view holds that moral propositions are analogous to propositions about chemistry, biology, or history, in so much as they are true despite what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. When they fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false—no matter what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. There are many versions of ethical objectivism, including various religious views of morality, Platonistic intuitionism, Kantianism, utilitarianism, and certain forms of ethical egoism and contractualism.
Nikolay Strakhov was also one of the most prominent opponents of Liberalism, Rationalism and Utilitarianism in Russia, who contributed greatly to the development of traditionalist Slavophile ideology and its more conservative and nationalist variant known as Pochvennichestvo. In 1883 Nikolay Strakhov wrote The Struggle Against the West in Russian Literature and supported ideas of Nikolay Danilevsky and claimed that Western European rationalism lacks scientific grounds. Nikolay Strakhov supported and encouraged the young Vasily Rozanov to become a writer and philosopher. Despite his conservatism and support for official government ideology of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality he was at times criticized by pro-government publications such as Mikhail Katkov’s Moskovskie Vedomosti.
Therefore, he does not believe in equal rights, but the person's life that should be favored that is most conducive to the general good. Godwin opposed government because it infringes on the individual's right to "private judgement" to determine which actions most maximize utility, but also makes a critique of all authority over the individual's judgement. This aspect of Godwin's philosophy, minus the utilitarianism, was developed into a more extreme form later by Stirner. Godwin took individualism to the radical extent of opposing individuals performing together in orchestras, writing in Political Justice that "everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil".
John Stuart Mill was born at 13 Rodney Street in Pentonville, Middlesex, the eldest son of Harriet Barrow and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist James Mill. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.
He defines hedonism "as an introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else." "Onfray's philosophical project is to define an ethical hedonism, a joyous utilitarianism, and a generalized aesthetic of sensual materialism that explores how to use the brain's and the body's capacities to their fullest extent - while restoring philosophy to a useful role in art, politics, and everyday life and decisions." Onfray's works "have explored the philosophical resonances and components of (and challenges to) science, painting, gastronomy, sex and sensuality, bioethics, wine, and writing. His most ambitious project is his projected six-volume Counter-history of Philosophy", of which three have been published.
Nozick writes: > Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who > get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than > these others lose ... the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed > in the monster's maw. It is also exemplified when Nozick writes: > Maximizing the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that > would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average. Parfit himself provided another similar criticism. Average utilitarianism seems to reject what Parfit calls "mere addition": the addition or creation of new lives that, although they may not be as happy as the average (and thus bring down the average), may still be intuitively well worth living.
Cochrane argues that, because they possess interests, sentient animals possess moral worth. He defends the claim that all sentient animals (human and otherwise) possess equal moral worth (and equal consideration of interests) against the possibility that humans have greater worth than animals and the possibility that persons have greater worth than non-persons. Rejecting Peter Singer's utilitarianism, Cochrane instead defends an account of animal rights based on the claim that sentient animals possess interests sufficiently strong to ground duties in others; they have, he said in Animal Rights Without Liberation, prima-facie rights not to be killed and not to be made to suffer. These moral rights, however, are not recognised in political or legal practice.
The word "Gothic" had been a term of opprobrium akin to "Vandal" until a few self- confident mid-18th-century English "Goths" like Horace Walpole initiated the Gothic Revival in the arts. This stimulated interest in the Middle Ages, which for the following generation began to take on the idyllic image of an "Age of Faith". This, reacting to a world dominated by Enlightenment rationalism, expressed a romantic view of a Golden Age of chivalry. The Middle Ages were seen with nostalgia as a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of the French Revolution and, most of all, to the environmental and social upheavals and utilitarianism of the developing Industrial Revolution.
Quite apart from being a historical romance The Misfortunes of Elphin is also a sustained satirical attack on contemporary Tory attitudes. Gwythno's dam stands for the British constitution, Seithenyn's speech disclaiming any need to repair it echoes various of George Canning's speeches rejecting constitutional reform, and the inundation represents the pressure for reform, or alternatively the French Revolution. Peacock also makes numerous ironic comments about the blessings of progress, and in his portrayal of the "plump, succulent" abbey of Avallon he attacks the over-comfortable clergy of the Church of England. Other targets of his satire include industrialization, the doctrine of utilitarianism, realpolitik, pollution, paper money, false literary taste and the Poet Laureateship.
From this he derived a version of utilitarianism, by arguing that to prescribe a particular action in one's circumstances was only rational if you would prescribe anyone's else's doing it, even if you were equally likely to be any agent (including all those affected, for good or ill, by the action). This would only be true if, were you to personally experience all the good and bad effects of the action upon all affected persons (i.e., the satisfaction and frustration of their preferences), you would not prefer some other action to the one in question.Hare, 1963Hare, 1981 He often simply called moral supervenience "universalizability" and equated it with Kant's principle of universal law,Hare, 1963, p.
His account of the development of Kant's philosophy is masterly, and he ranks Kant as the culminating thinker of the Enlightenment. The Kantian emphasis on moral freedom through intuitive recognition and willing assent to a universally binding moral law was the keynote of his ethics and the fulcrum of his opposition to all forms of utilitarianism and pragmatism. In "The Vocation of the Scholar," in the volume A Defense of Prejudice, he opposes William James's "creed of change," with this declaration of philosophical fundamentalism: "There are certain ideas which in the history of the race experience have become established for all time, for all places, and for all persons and things" (pp. 146–47).
But Godwin's egotism displeased Harriet, and she frankly rebuked his vanity. Godwin again visited Bath at the end of 1798 and paid her formal addresses, but Miss Lee, who seems to have had a regard for her eccentric suitor, finally decided that his religious opinions made a happy union impossible (Godwin is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism.). Her last letter, 7 August 1798, expressed a hope that friendly intercourse might be maintained; and Godwin sent letters to her at a later date criticising some of her literary productions. Among other of her friends were Jane and Anna Maria Porter, the novelists, who lived at Bristol, and Thomas Lawrence.
MacIntyre emphasises the importance of moral goods defined in respect to a community engaged in a 'practice'—which he calls 'internal goods' or 'goods of excellence'—rather than focusing on practice- independent obligation of a moral agent (deontological ethics) or the consequences of a particular act (utilitarianism). Before its recent resurgence, virtue ethics in European/American academia had been primarily associated with pre-modern philosophers (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas). MacIntyre has argued that Aquinas' synthesis of Augustinianism with Aristotelianism is more insightful than modern moral theories by focusing upon the telos ('end', or completion) of a social practice and of a human life, within the context of which the morality of acts may be evaluated.
The idea of a just society first gained modern attention when philosophers such as John Stuart Mill asked, "What is a 'just society'?" Their writings covered several different perspectives including allowing individuals to live their lives as long as they didn't infringe on the rights to others, to the idea that the resources of society should be distributed to all, including those most deserving first. In 1861, John Stuart Mill published an essay entitled, "Utilitarianism". In this famous essay, Mill advocated the latter view, in which decision makers attended to the "common good" and all other citizens worked collectively to build communities and programs that would contribute to the good of others.
Rahwan is one of the first to consider the problem of self autonomous vehicles as an ethical dilemma. His 2016 paper, The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles, showed that people approved of utilitarian autonomous vehicles, and wanted others to purchase these vehicles, but they themselves would prefer to ride in an autonomous vehicle that protected its passenger at all costs, and would not use self-driving vehicles if utilitarianism was imposed on them by law. Thus the paper concludes the regulation of utilitarian algorithms could paradoxically increase casualties by driving by inadvertently postponing the adoption of a safer technology. The paper spurred much coverage about the role of ethics in the creation of artificially intelligent driving systems.
It developed a broader theory of moral choice, one applicable to other forms of ethnic, religious, racial, and sectarian prejudice, aggression, and violence. By taking issue with ethical theories – such as Kantian or Utilitarianism ethics – that explain moral action based primarily on rational deliberation, Monroe argues that identity is more fundamental than reasoning in our treatment of others. Monroe’s work in this trilogy is credited with creating the microfoundations for the scientific study of ethics and for reinvigorating moral psychology as a field. Her other work explores issues of gender equality within academia, stem cell research, the development of empirical political theory, interdisciplinary work in social science, and how people keep their humanity during war.
It is also arguably more consistent with common sense than radical forms of egalitarianism that value only equality. Such a view might say that if the only way to achieve equality is by bringing Jim down from 110 to -73, it ought to be done. Prioritarianism does not accord any intrinsic value to equality of well-being across individuals and would not regard a move toward a more equal distribution of well-being as better if the worse off did not benefit. In addition to having potential advantages over utilitarianism and pure egalitarianism (as noted above), prioritarianism also avoids some putatively embarrassing implications of a related view, the maximin principle (also note Rawls's difference principle).
But the underlying intuition is something that can be shared by almost everybody: We can all agree that no additional suffering should be created without need. Albert Camus once spoke about the solidarity of all finite beings against death, and in just the same sense there should be a solidarity of all sentient beings capable of suffering against suffering. Out of this solidarity we should not do anything that would increase the overall amount of suffering and confusion in the universe—let alone something that highly likely will have this effect right from the beginning.” Mario Bunge writes about negative utilitarianism in his Treatise on Basic Philosophy but in a different sense than most others.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the English philosopher, also argued that utilitarianism must take animals into account, writing in 1864: "Nothing is more natural to human beings, nor, up to a certain point in cultivation, more universal, than to estimate the pleasures and pains of others as deserving of regard exactly in proportion to their likeness to ourselves. ... Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned."Garner (2005), p.
Posner rejects the concept of animal rights. He recognizes the philosophical force of arguments for animal rights, but maintains that human intuition about the paramount value of human life makes it impossible to accommodate an ethic of animal rights. In a 2000 Yale Law Journal book review on the title "Rattling the Cage" by Steven M. Wise, Posner again criticized the legal notion of animal rights. In the review, Posner argues that Wise's approach, using the cognitive ability of animals compared to that of very young normal human beings as a basis for rights-worthiness, is arbitrary and in contrast with major traditional and contemporary philosophies (including the theology of Thomas Aquinas for one and utilitarianism for another).
Peter Singer, "Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980): 335. Chartier dissects Singer's argument, maintaining that it is unsuccessful because it fails to take proper account of the actual characteristics of the meat production market (or any similarly enormous market). He examines in detail consequentialist, natural law, and virtue theoretic accounts of boycotting the meat industry, concluding that both natural law and virtue theory provide limited grounds on which a boycott might be defended, but that consequentialism does not. While he maintains, in tandem with the new classical natural law theorists, that consequentialism is in principle incoherent, he also challenges the factual predictions made by consequentialist proponents of the meat industry boycott.
Edmund Burke Historically, conservatism in the 18th and 19th centuries comprised a set of principles based on concern for established tradition, respect for authority and religious values. This form of traditionalist or classical conservatism is often considered to be exemplified by the writings of Joseph de Maistre in the post-Enlightenment age. Contemporaneous liberalism, now recalled as classical liberalism, advocated both political freedom for individuals and a free market in the economic sphere. Ideas of this sort were promulgated by John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who are respectively remembered as the fathers of liberalism, including economic liberalism, the separation of church and state, social liberalism and utilitarianism.
A fictional painting of Jeremy Bentham overseeing the construction of UCL in the Flaxman gallery inside the 'main library' The philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), advocate of Utilitarianism, is often credited with being one of the founders of the original 'University of London'. This is not the case, although the myth of his direct participation has been perpetuated in a mural by Henry Tonks, in the dome above the Flaxman gallery (named after artist John Flaxman in the UCL Main Building). This shows William Wilkins, the architect of the main building, submitting the plans to Bentham for his approval while the portico is under construction in the background. The scene is however apocryphal.
Istislah bears some similarities to the natural law tradition in the West, as exemplified by Thomas Aquinas. However, whereas natural law deems good that which is known self-evidently to be good, according as it tends towards the fulfilment of the person, istislah calls good whatever is connected to one of five "basic goods". Al-Ghazali abstracted these "basic goods" from the five legal precepts in the Quran and Sunnah—religion, life, reason, lineage (or offspring), and property. In this classical formulation, istislah differs from utilitarianism—"the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people"—because something that results in "the greatest happiness" may infringe any one of the five basic values.
Thought and Change is a 1964 book by the philosopher Ernest Gellner, in which the author outlines his views on "modernity" and looks at the processes of social change and historical transformation and, perhaps most forcefully, the power of nationalism. Maleŝević and Haugaard argue that the method is the socio-historical method, and Gellner sets out a powerful sociology of specific philosophical doctrines and ideologies, from utilitarianism and Kantianism to nationalism. The chapter specifically dealing with nationalism was later expanded to form the basis of Gellner's most famous book, Nations and Nationalism (1983). They also note that rather than looking at the internal coherence of philosophies, Gellner places them in their historical context.
Jeremy Bentham (United Kingdom, 1748–1832) An early advocate of utilitarianism, animal welfare and women's rights. He had many students all around the world, including John Stuart Mill and several political leaders. Bentham demanded economic and individual freedom, including the separation of the state and church, freedom of expression, completely equal rights for women, the end of slavery and colonialism, uniform democracy, the abolition of physical punishment, also on children, the right for divorce, free prices, free trade and no restrictions on interest. Bentham was not a libertarian: he supported inheritance tax, restrictions on monopoly power, pensions, health insurance and other social security, but called for prudence and careful consideration in any such governmental intervention.
Since the 18th century, people have become increasingly concerned about the welfare of farm animals. Possible measures of welfare include longevity, behavior, physiology, reproduction, freedom from disease, and freedom from immunosuppression. Standards and laws for animal welfare have been created worldwide, broadly in line with the most widely held position in the western world, a form of utilitarianism: that it is morally acceptable for humans to use non-human animals, provided that no unnecessary suffering is caused, and that the benefits to humans outweigh the costs to the livestock. An opposing view is that animals have rights, should not be regarded as property, are not necessary to use, and should never be used by humans.
Singer made his decision to support utilitarianism on the basis of sentience, selecting that aspect as the differential factor between human and animals; the ability of self-consciousness, autonomy and to act morally. This ended up being called "The argument from marginal cases". However, another argument was made that not all beings fall under this category, as some people have a disability, which limits the way they can function as someone without, for example, if someone is in a persistent vegetative state they have no awareness of themselves or their surroundings. Thus, from this ideology, it would be ok to carry out these same tests on these humans as we do the animals.
Kant's claim that humanity is an end in itself shows just how much this instrumental conception of reason has dominated our thinking. Utilitarianism, Arendt claims, is based on a failure to distinguish between "in order to" and "for the sake of." The homo faber mentality is further evident in the substitution of the notion of "use value" for "worth" in economic discourse, which marks the beginning of the disappearance of a notion of a kind of worth that is intrinsic, as opposed to value, which is relative to human demand or need. Although use objects are good examples of the products of work, artworks are perhaps the best examples, since they have the greatest durability of all objects.
He holds that while direct action should be tolerated in liberal democracies, this toleration should not extend to certain campaigning tactics used by extremists, such as threat- making. With O'Sullivan, Hadley has conducted research on utilitarianism and the relationship between obligations to animals and obligations to needy humans. The scholars argue that there is a conflict in Singer's philosophy between the obligation to aid needy humans and to protect animals, and that Westerners who own pets should, rather than spending large amounts of money extending the lives of their companions, euthanise severely ill animals and instead donate money to aiding those in the developing world. Hadley has been critical of the views of Tibor Machan and J. Baird Callicott.
He quotes utilitarianism as "The greatest happiness principle", defining this theory by saying that pleasure and no pain are the only inherently good things in the world and expands on it by saying that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure." He views it not as an animalistic concept because he sees seeking out pleasure as a way of using our higher facilities. He also says in this chapter that the happiness principle is based not exclusively on the individual but mainly on the community.
In this highly original but now largely forgotten work, MacKaye attempted to rescue the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham from the changes that this doctrine had subsequently undergone as a result of John Stuart Mill's moderating influence. MacKaye conceived human beings—and sentient beings generally—as mechanisms of transforming resources into happiness, which he argued was the only intrinsic good. The goal of a society was therefore viewed by MacKaye as the problem of finding that arrangement which would produce the highest output of happiness attainable given the inputs available. As he wrote, ::That which society should seek to attain, the maximum surplus of happiness, may be referred to by different names according to the relation in which we think of it, e.g.
Taking Rights Seriously is a 1977 book about the philosophy of law by the philosopher Ronald Dworkin. In the book, Dworkin argues against the dominant philosophy of Anglo-American legal positivism as presented by H. L. A. Hart in The Concept of Law (1961) and utilitarianism by proposing that rights of the individual against the state exist outside of the written law and function as "trumps" against the interests or wishes of the majority. Most of the book's chapters are revised versions of previously published papers. In addition to his critique of legal positivism and utilitarian ethics, Dworkin includes important discussions of constitutional interpretation, judicial discretion, civil disobedience, reverse discrimination, John Rawls' theory of justice, and the Hart–Devlin debate on legislating morality.
Altruism is often seen as a form of consequentialism, as it indicates that an action is ethically right if it brings good consequences to others. Altruism may be seen as similar to utilitarianism, however an essential difference is that the latter prescribes acts that maximize good consequences for all of society, while altruism prescribes maximizing good consequences for everyone except the actor. Spencer argued that since the rest of society will almost always outnumber the utilitarian, a genuine utilitarian will inevitably end up practicing altruism or a form of altruism.Principles of Ethics §85ff Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that maintains that the consequences of our actions - for ourselves and others - are important, and seeks to maximise the overall quality of these consequences.
In Daybreak, Nietzsche began his "Campaign against Morality". He called himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticized the prominent moral philosophies of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. Nietzsche's concept "God is dead" applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he complimented for fostering critical thought. Still, Nietzsche saw his philosophy as a counter- movement to nihilism through appreciation of art: Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practiced was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did; in particular, his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians constantly did.
Hence, in default of self-defense in the first instance, any damage to property must be made good either in kind or by value. Similarly, theorists such as George Fletcher and Robert Schopp have adopted European concepts of autonomy in their liberal theories to justify the right-holder using all necessary force to defend his or her autonomy and rights. This right inverts the felicitation principle of utilitarianism with the responsive violence being the greatest good to the individual, but accurately mirrors Jeremy Bentham who saw property as the driving force to enable individuals to enhance their utilities through stable investment and trade. In liberal theory, therefore, to maximise the utility, there is no need to retreat nor use only proportionate force.
Moral universalism (also called moral objectivism) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for "all similarly situated individuals", regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or any other distinguishing feature. Moral universalism is opposed to moral nihilism and moral relativism. However, not all forms of moral universalism are absolutist, nor are they necessarily value monist; many forms of universalism, such as utilitarianism, are non-absolutist, and some forms, such as that of Isaiah Berlin, may be value pluralist. In addition to the theories of moral realism, moral universalism includes other cognitivist moral theories, such as the subjectivist ideal observer theory and divine command theory, and also the non-cognitivist moral theory of universal prescriptivism.
He participated in the conspiracy that ended with the triumph of Rafael del Riego in 1820 and was considered to be a great orator; defending Liberalism during the Trienio Liberal. When Ferdinand VII was restored to power after the French invasion, he was forced into self-exile in London. While there, he survived by teaching Spanish language and literature classes then, from 1828 to 1830, held the Chair of Spanish at the newly created University College. Until then, he had been a great admirer of Montesquieu, but soon absorbed English ways of thinking, befriended Jeremy Bentham, became attracted to the moderate liberalism of Edmund Burke and rejected abstract principles in favor of utilitarianism, then adopted the doctrinaire liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant.
Many feminist economists argue economics should be focused less on mechanisms (like income) or theories (such as utilitarianism) and more on well-being, a multidimensional concept including income, health, education, empowerment and social status. They argue that economic success can not be measured only by goods or gross domestic product, but must also be measured by human well-being. Aggregate income is not sufficient to evaluate general well- being, because individual entitlements and needs must also be considered, leading feminist economists to study health, longevity, access to property, education, and related factors. Bina Agarwal and Pradeep Panda illustrate that a woman's property status (such as owning a house or land) directly and significantly reduces her chances of experiencing domestic violence, while employment makes little difference.
Politically, MacIntyre's ethics informs a defence of the Aristotelian 'goods of excellence' internal to practices against the modern pursuit of 'external goods', such as money, power, and status, that are characteristic of rule-based, utilitarian, Weberian modern institutions. He has been described as a 'revolutionary Aristotelian' because of his attempt to combine historical insights from his Marxist past with those of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle after MacIntyre's conversion to Catholicism. For him, liberalism and postmodern consumerism not only justify capitalism but also sustain and inform it over the long term. At the same time, he says that "Marxists have always fallen back into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism" and criticises Marxism as just another form of radical individualism.
Cochrane then deals with four possible objections. Interest rights are defended against the claim that moral agency is a prerequisite of rights-possession, against the demand that rights be derived from social relations, against the suggestion, from R. G. Frey, that animals do not possess interests, and against the idea that inanimate entities and plants may possess interests. At this point, Cochrane has completed the first two steps introducing his interest-based rights approach; the third is outlining the approach itself as the appropriate means of understanding obligations to animals in political communities. Utilitarianism, as advocated by Peter Singer, is rejected because of its failure to take individuals seriously enough; Cochrane desires an account which takes well-being seriously but is not purely aggregative.
The concept of the veil of ignorance has been in use by other names for centuries by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant whose work discussed the concept of the social contract, Adam Smith with his "impartial spectator", or the ideal observer theory. John Harsanyi helped to formalize the concept in economics, and argued that it provides an argument in favor of utilitarianism rather than an argument for a social contract, as rational agents consider expected outcomes, not maximin outcomes or the worst- case outcomes. Harsanyi argued that a person in the original position would maximize their expected utility, rather than choosing minimax. The usage of the term by John Rawls was developed in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice.
An enthusiastic student of the writers and ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly Condorcet, Thompson became a convinced egalitarian and democrat. His support for the French Revolution earned him the label of "Red Republican" from Cork society and his support for advocates of Catholic emancipation in elections further alienated him from the rest of his wealthy Protestant kith and kin. Thompson was greatly impressed by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, with whom he corresponded and established a friendship, later staying at the English philosopher's house for several months in 1821–22 while visiting London. As well as Bentham, Thompson read and corresponded with other utilitarian contemporaries such as James Mill, and was influenced, both positively and negatively, by William Godwin and Thomas Malthus.
Nozick writes: > Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who > get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than > these others lose ... the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed > in the monster's maw, in order to increase total utility. This thought experiment attempts to show that utilitarianism is not actually egalitarian, even though it appears to be at first glance. The experiment contends that there is no way of aggregating utility which can circumvent the conclusion that all units should be given to a utility monster, because it's possible to tailor a monster to any given system. For example, Rawls' maximin considers a group's utility to be the same as the utility of the member who's worst off.
The reason this can come to be, and the reason the utility monster is a condition of utilitarianism in effect, is because the philosophy necessarily begs the question of how to measure happiness. A person can be in much grief, but there is no physical way to measure the lack of happiness they experience, and whether this is greater or less than a person who is enduring a different pain, like physical torture. Rephrased, this brings to light the question of which person is more deserving and which person is less deserving of happiness units based on life experiences. Individuals must take other's word regarding how much happiness they each possess, and the happiness they should therefore be able to lay claim.
In a 2016 article, Cochrane extended his interest-based rights approach to include labour rights for nonhuman animals, on the basis that working animals are members of our society and workers. These rights include a right to representation in a union, a right to "just and favourable remuneration", a right to safe and healthy conditions of work, and a right to time off from work. In his interest-based rights approach, Cochrane draws upon a number of normative theories, but most particularly utilitarianism and liberalism, and the framework has been presented by commentators as a possible middle-ground between the rights theory of Regan and the utilitarian account offered by Peter Singer. Cochrane is not the first theorist to advocate an interest-based account of animal rights.
Nozick arrives at the night-watchman state of classical liberalism theory by showing that there are non-redistributive reasons for the apparently redistributive procedure of making its clients pay for the protection of others. He defines what he calls an ultraminimal state, which would not have this seemingly redistributive feature but would be the only one allowed to enforce rights. Proponents of this ultraminimal state don't defend it on the grounds of trying to minimize the total of (weighted) violations of rights (what he calls utilitarianism of rights). That idea would mean, for example, that someone could punish another person he or she knows to be innocent in order to calm down a mob that would otherwise violate even more rights.
Nozick's entitlement theory is a non-patterned historical principle. Almost all other principles of distributive justice (egalitarianism, utilitarianism) are patterned principles of justice. Such principles follow the form, "to each according to..." Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument is an attempt to show that patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty. He asks us to assume that the original distribution in society, D1, is ordered by our choice of patterned principle, for instance Rawls's Difference Principle. Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Chamberlain 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur).
Something similar to the Library Bill of Rights could be retained as an accompanying "aspirational creed", such as a revised form of the ALA Code of Ethics, but it would need to provide more practical guidance. David Woolwine of Hofstra University has criticized the philosophical underpinnings of the Library Bill of Rights, specifically objecting to the use of utilitarianism and "rights discourse" in defense of the principles. The "moral calculus" of the utilitarian argument that free access of information produces the greatest good for the greatest number can also be used to argue in support of restrictions for the purposes of safety and national security. Rights discourse relies on the assertion of rights with minimal referencing, while neglecting detailed argumentation.
Mazzini late in his career An Italian nationalist, Mazzini was a fervent advocate of republicanism and envisioned a united, free and independent Italy. Unlike his contemporary Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was also a republican, Mazzini refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the House of Savoy until after the Capture of Rome. While he and his followers were sensitive to the question of social justice, starting a dialogue with socialism and Mazzini in particular finding many affinities with the Saint- Simonians, Mazzini was vigorously opposed to Marxism which for him was "a dreadful perversion of utilitarianism because of its insistence on class interests, especially class struggle, a conflictual vision that could not harmonize with Mazzini's unitarianism".Rosselli, Carlo; Urbinati, Nadia, ed. (2017).
When we are "playing God or the ideal observer," we use the specific form, and we will need to do this when we are deciding what general principles to teach and follow. When we are "inculcating" or in situations where the biases of our human nature are likely to prevent us doing the calculations properly, then we should use the more general rule utilitarianism. Hare argues that in practice, most of the time, we should be following the general principles: In Moral Thinking (1981), Hare illustrated the two extremes. The "archangel" is the hypothetical person who has perfect knowledge of the situation and no personal biases or weaknesses and always uses critical moral thinking to decide the right thing to do.
This position is advocated by Iain King, who has suggested the evolutionary basis of empathy means humans can take into account the interests of other individuals, but only on a one-to-one basis, "since we can only imagine ourselves in the mind of one other person at a time."This quote is from Iain King's article in issue 100 of Philosophy Now magazine, Moral Laws of the Jungle (link), accessed 29 January 2014. King uses this insight to adapt utilitarianism, and it may help reconcile Bentham's philosophy with deontology and virtue ethics. Philosopher John Taurek also argued that the idea of adding happiness or pleasures across persons is quite unintelligible and that the numbers of persons involved in a situation are morally irrelevant.
Fine logic and language is used to convey morality whilst eschewing utilitarianism. The book's style is also highly regarded and considered a model example. Wang Anshi's Xining Reforms (熙寧變法) are rejected by the History of Song whilst political reform campaigners including Lu Huiqing (呂惠卿), Zeng Bu (曾布) and Zhang Dun (章惇) feature in the section on traitors and rebels, Shi Miyuan (史彌遠) however, despite his involvement in the suicide of Emperor Ningzong of Song's eldest heir, does not feature in this section or indeed the entire History of Song. Famous general Wang Jianzai (王堅在), regardless of his valiant combat record, is also omitted as are many other individuals involved in Mongol defeats by the Song.
The substantive doctrine (with variations offered by utilitarianism, social contract theory, and Rawls) also fails because it cannot find a neutral way to legislate among individual and competing values. The third basis for legislation, based on a doctrine of shared values, is a partial attempt to escape liberal doctrine, one that does not go far enough. It has the merit of viewing freedom as something other than the liberal concept of freedom to do whatever one wants; freedom, under the doctrine of shared values, is a development of human capacities, talents, and powers, and the task of the state is to choose arrangements that foster this human flourishing. If taken to the hilt, the doctrine of shared values might be a coherent basis for lawmaking.
Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism which holds merely that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. However, these doctrines may occasionally be combined with ethical egoism. Ethical egoism contrasts with ethical altruism, which holds that moral agents have an obligation to help and serve others. Egoism and altruism both contrast with ethical utilitarianism, which holds that a moral agent should treat one's self (also known as the subject) with no higher regard than one has for others (as egoism does, by elevating self-interests and "the self" to a status not granted to others), but that one also should not (as altruism does) sacrifice one's own interests to help others' interests, so long as one's own interests (i.e.
Relative utilitarianism can serve to rationalize using 2% as an intergenerationally fair social discount rate for cost-benefit analysis. Mertens and Rubinchik show that a shift- invariant welfare function defined on a rich space of (temporary) policies, if differentiable, has as a derivative a discounted sum of the policy (change), with a fixed discount rate, i.e., the induced social discount rate. (Shift- invariance requires a function evaluated on a shifted policy to return an affine transformation of the value of the original policy, while the coefficients depend on the time-shift only.) In an overlapping generations model with exogenous growth (with time being the whole real line), relative utilitarian function is shift-invariant when evaluated on (small temporary) policies around a balanced growth equilibrium (with capital stock growing exponentially).
A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), which he maintained provides a basis for understanding human behavior—more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for adaptation or survival. As such, according to Nietzsche, the drive for conservation appears as the major motivator of human or animal behavior only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of a 'struggle for existence.' More often than not, self-conservation is a consequence of a creature's will to exert its strength on the outside world. In presenting his theory of human behavior, Nietzsche also addressed and attacked, concepts from philosophies then popularly embraced, such as Schopenhauer's notion of an aimless will or that of utilitarianism.
Unlike utilitarianism, which views pleasure as a moral good, "the basic goods in Mohist consequentialist thinking are... order, material wealth, and increase in population". During Mozi's era, war and famines were common, and population growth was seen as a moral necessity for a harmonious society. The "material wealth" of Mohist consequentialism refers to basic needs like shelter and clothing, and the "order" of Mohist consequentialism refers to Mozi's stance against warfare and violence, which he viewed as pointless and a threat to social stability. Stanford sinologist David Shepherd Nivison, in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, writes that the moral goods of Mohism "are interrelated: more basic wealth, then more reproduction; more people, then more production and wealth... if people have plenty, they would be good, filial, kind, and so on unproblematically".
It is also contrasted with virtue ethics, which focuses on the character of the agent rather than on the nature or consequences of the act (or omission) itself, and pragmatic ethics which treats morality like science: advancing socially over the course of many lifetimes, such that any moral criterion is subject to revision. Some argue that consequentialist theories (such as utilitarianism) and deontological theories (such as Kantian ethics) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, T. M. Scanlon advances the idea that human rights, which are commonly considered a "deontological" concept, can only be justified with reference to the consequences of having those rights. Similarly, Robert Nozick argued for a theory that is mostly consequentialist, but incorporates inviolable "side-constraints" which restrict the sort of actions agents are permitted to do.
Although classical liberals aspired to a minimum of state activity, they accepted the principle of government intervention in the economy from the early 19th century on, with passage of the Factory Acts. From around 1840 to 1860, laissez-faire advocates of the Manchester School and writers in The Economist were confident that their early victories would lead to a period of expanding economic and personal liberty and world peace, but would face reversals as government intervention and activity continued to expand from the 1850s. Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, although advocates of laissez-faire, non-intervention in foreign affairs, and individual liberty, believed that social institutions could be rationally redesigned through the principles of utilitarianism. The Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli rejected classical liberalism altogether and advocated Tory democracy.
The concept of the veil of ignorance has been in use by other names for centuries by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant whose work discussed the concept of the social contract, Adam Smith with his "impartial spectator", or the ideal observer theory. John Harsanyi helped to formalize the concept in economics, and argued that it provides an argument in favor of utilitarianism rather than an argument for a social contract, as rational agents consider expected outcomes, not maximin outcomes or the worst-case outcomes. The usage of the term by John Rawls was developed in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Modern work tends to focus on the different decision theories that might describe the choice of the decision-maker "behind the veil".
Coningsby was the first of a trilogy of novels (together with Sybil and Tancred) which marked a departure from Disraeli's silver-fork novels of the 1830s and which are his most famous. Benjamin Disraeli The book is set against a background of the real political events of the 1830s in England that followed the enactment of the Reform Bill of 1832. In describing these events Disraeli sets out his own beliefs including his opposition to Robert Peel, his dislikes of both the British Whig Party and the ideals of Utilitarianism, and the need for social justice in a newly industrialized society. He portrays the self-serving politician in the character of Rigby (based on John Wilson Croker) and the malicious party insiders in the characters of Taper and Tadpole.
Tanaka was a leader in a larger movement re-conceptualizing nature during the Meiji period. His activism associated with the Ashio Copper Mine touches on the Freedom and People's Rights Movement's ideologies of Natural Rights and Utilitarianism, ultimately leading to the development of environmental politics in Japan. Tanaka’s political activism against the 1896 River Law led to the development of his ecological philosophy and terminology; poison (Doku) and flow (Nagare). This philosophy is described by Robert Stolz as an "...ecological theory of society based on the twin processes of nature..." In relation to the 1896 River Law, which sought to remake the Kanto Plain, Doku represented the unnatural damning of the river and the inevitable build up poisons in the watershed, while Nagare represented the natural way of things.
Allocative efficiency is a state of the economy in which production represents consumer preferences; in particular, every good or service is produced up to the point where the last unit provides a marginal benefit to consumers equal to the marginal cost of producing. In contract theory, allocative efficiency is achieved in a contract in which the skill demanded by the offering party and the skill of the agreeing party are the same. Although there are different standards of evaluation for the concept of allocative efficiency, the basic principle asserts that in any economic system, choices in resource allocation produce both "winners" and "losers" relative to the choice being evaluated. The principles of rational choice, individual maximization, utilitarianism and market theory further suppose that the outcomes for winners and losers can be identified, compared and measured.
In addition to his work on Kant, Hill has done work (mostly collected in his collection Autonomy and Self-Respect (Cambridge University Press, 1991) searching for and articulating the values we presuppose in our moral judgments on particular cases by focusing on realistic examples. He often suggests why familiar moral theories such as utilitarianism do not fully explain our grounds for these judgments and attempts to explain and partially defend the non-standard values we work from in everyday life. In his "Servility and Self-Respect" (1973) Hill explores the kinds of servile attitudes of those who have lost their self-respect. He makes a case for affirmative action in his "The Message of Affirmative Action" (1991) that is not exclusively focused on providing future benefits or righting past wrongs.
In the twelfth chapter, "The Collapse Of The Kosmos", Wilber uses Taylor's account of the effects of the Enlightenment paradigm to show how vertical depth was collapsed into horizontal span and how the ascending drive was dissociated into the "Ego camp" (Immanuel Kant's and Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Transcendent Ego) and the "Eco camp" (Baruch Spinoza's deified Nature). Utilitarianism is described as mistaking sensory pleasure for Spirit, which ultimately resulted in a fixation on hedonism and sex in modern society. In the thirteenth chapter, "The Dominance Of The Descenders", Wilber describes how the West tried to embrace the Many through science, but failed to embrace the One through mysticism. The result was the rise of Thanatos (Sigmund Freud's death drive), and Phobos (existential fear), which are the respective pathological versions of Agape and Eros.
26–27 Although classical liberals aspired to a minimum of state activity, they eventually accepted the principle of government intervention in the economy from the early 19th century with the passage of the Factory Acts. From around 1840 to 1860, laissez-faire advocates of the Manchester School and writers in The Economist were confident that their early victories would lead to a period of expanding economic and personal liberty and world peace but would face reversals as government intervention and activity continued to expand from the 1850s. Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, although advocates of laissez-faire, non-intervention in foreign affairs, and individual liberty, believed that social institutions could be rationally redesigned through the principles of Utilitarianism. By the 1870s, Herbert Spencer and other classical liberals concluded that historical development was turning against them.
The first major philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment was Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1729 to 1746. He was an important link between the ideas of Shaftesbury and the later school of Scottish Common Sense Realism, developing Utilitarianism and Consequentialist thinking. Also influenced by Shaftesbury was George Turnbull (1698–1748), who was regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and who published pioneering work in the fields of Christian ethics, art and education.A. Broadie, A History of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), , p. 120. David Hume (1711–76) whose Treatise on Human Nature (1738) and Essays, Moral and Political (1741) helped outline the parameters of philosophical Empiricism and Scepticism.R. Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage, Scotland 1603–1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), , p. 150.
John's writings are excellent at clarifying the literary and scientific position of 12th century Western Europe. Though he was well versed in the new logic and dialectical rhetoric of the university, John's views imply a cultivated intelligence well versed in practical affairs, opposing to the extremes of both nominalism and realism a practical common sense. His doctrine is a kind of utilitarianism, with a strong leaning on the speculative side to the modified literary scepticism of Cicero, for whom he had unbounded admiration and on whose style he based his own. His view that the end of education was moral, rather than merely intellectual, became one of the prime educational doctrines of western civilization, but his influence is to be found, not in his immediate contemporaries but in the world-view of Renaissance humanism.
Under the influence of Leonard Bloomfield and W.V.O. Quine he adopted the foundations of linguistic behaviorism, according to which the subject of the linguist's work is not mental processes, but language behaviors. He used the terminology introduced by Rudolf Carnap, although he consistently used the term sentence instead of proposition to designate the basic unit of logical examination (which revealed his ties with the Lwów–Warsaw school). He treated language as a set of sentences on which transformations operate; while language comprehension was considered closely related to the understanding of a sentence in the context of the system of other sentences. In ethics, he advocated negative utilitarianism, recommending “taking care not of good for as many people as possible, but of reducing evil equally to every human being”.
"Suffering-focused ethics" is an umbrella term that covers different normative positions which share the common element of giving priority to suffering. Even though all these doctrines share this common general aim, they make different claims regarding how we should act. An example of these views is negative consequentialism, which claims that we should minimize suffering because a situation becomes better when there is less suffering in it. A form of negative consequentialism is negative utilitarianism, the view that we should aim at bringing about the least possible amount of aggregate suffering, adding up everyone's suffering as having equal value (no matter whose such suffering is).Animal Ethics (2014) "Negative Consequentialism", Ethics and Animals Other suffering-focused views can be, however, deontologic ethics, and claim, instead, that we have agent- relative reasons when reducing suffering.
On this account Mill elaborated on the ethical dimension of Utilitarianism, measuring the right- and wrongness of an action both in terms of aggregate happiness, or "utility", following Bentham's fundamental axiom, but not without disregard of moral or ethical quality of the action itself. Therefore, in Mill's perspective a bank would be moral if it tended "to promote happiness".(p. 10) If the bank in question acts in way that produces the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people then it will be acting morally according to Mill. Because the banking sector is so large, complex and far-reaching in its effects it is difficult to accurately judge the happiness of everyone affected by the conduct of banks in general or by certain banks in particular.
Much of conventional welfare economics today is grounded in a utilitarian approach according to the classical Benthamite form of utilitarianism, in which the most desirable action is the one that best increases peoples' psychological happiness or satisfaction. The "utility" of a person stands for some measure of his or her pleasure or happiness. Some merits associated with this approach to measuring well-being are that it recognizes the importance of taking account of the results of social arrangements in judging them and the need to pay attention to the well-being of the people involved when judging social arrangements and their results. Amartya Sen, however, argues this view has three main deficiencies: distributional indifference, neglect of rights, freedoms and other non-utility concerns, and adaptation and mental conditioning.
The ethic she presents is similar to John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, but while Mill's approach locates value in pleasure, Palmer's process ethic locates value in "richness" of experience. She then compares this ethic to several dominant schools in environmental ethics: "individualist consequentialism" (as championed by Peter Singer, Donald VanDeVeer and Robin Attfield), "individualist deontological environmental ethics" (including the diverse positions presented by Albert Schweitzer, Kenneth Goodpastor, Tom Regan and Paul W. Taylor), "collectivist environmental ethics" (including those thinkers who advocate doing what is best for nature as a whole, such as Aldo Leopold and Callicott in his earlier work) and deep ecology. Process ethics, Palmer argues, is closer to individualist consequentialism than individualist deontological environmental ethics. In considering collectivist environmental ethics, Palmer asks how process thinkers could approach natural collectives, such as ecosystems.
David McNaughton argues that, even if the agent's commitment to his/her principles is not undermined, two-level utilitarianism does not succeed in its goal of showing, "how, on utilitarian principles, it is a good idea to think and reason in a pluralist and non-consequentialist manner." It is impossible, he claims, to compartmentalise one's thinking in the way the two-level account requires—to simultaneously think like a utilitarian and act in a non- utilitarian way. Hare's response to this type of criticism is that he does his own moral thinking in this way, therefore the challenge that this type of moral thinking is impossible must be false. A third variety of objection somewhat related to the problem of 'weakness of will' is that difficulties arise when we try to keep critical thinking separate from intuitive thinking.
In the same period, Gorz was becoming a leading figure of political ecology, his ideas being spread in particular by the ecologist monthly Le Sauvage, founded by Alain Hervé, the founder of the French section of the Friends of the Earth. In 1975 he published Ecologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), which included the essay Ecologie et liberté, "one of the foundational texts of the ecologic problematic" (Françoise GollainFrançoise Gollain, Pensée écologique et critique du travail dans une perspective gorzienne, Orléans, Ph.D. en economic sciences, 1999, p. 113). He was also influenced by Louis Dumont in considering Marxism and Liberalism to be two versions of economist thought. Gorz then opposed himself both to hedonist individualism and utilitarianism and to materialist and productivist collectivism, defending a humanist version of ecology similar to social ecology which is opposed to deep ecology.
Braybrooke's research interests included problems in ethics, philosophy, and political and social science, and he authored over 150 articles, book chapters and scholarly reviews, and 11 books, including A Strategy of Decision (with C. E. Lindblom) (1963), Three Tests for Democracy (1967), Philosophy of Social Science (1987), Meeting Needs (1987), and Logic on the Track of Social Change (with Bryson Brown and Peter K. Schotch) (1995). Another book in which he had a large part, Social Rules, came out in 1996. The University of Toronto Press published a collection of his essays, Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change, in 1998, and, in 2001, Natural Law Modernized, came out at the same press, as did Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations in 2004. University of Toronto Press published a fourth book in this series in 2006, Analytical Political Philosophy: From Discourse, Edification.
Some people have the intuition that, all else being equal, adding a happy person to the population does not constitute an improvement to the overall state of the world. This intuition is captured by the person-affecting class of views in population ethics, and is often expressed in Jan Narveson's words that "we are in favour of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people". Person-affecting views can be seen as a revision of total utilitarianism in which the "scope of the aggregation" is changed from all individuals who would exist to a subset of those individuals (namely those individuals who already exist). They avoid the repugnant conclusion, because they deny that a loss of wellbeing in the present generation can be compensated by bringing additional people into existence that would enjoy a high wellbeing.
The first book of much consequence which he published was Die Einheit des Staats und der Kirche mit Rücksicht auf die Deutsche Reichsverfassung (1797), a work on the relations of church and state, with special reference to the constitution of the empire, which displayed the writer's power of analysis and his skill in making a complicated set of facts appear to be deductions from a few principles. In 1805 appeared Versuch einer allgemeinen Hermeneutik des Rechts; and in 1806 Die Wissenschaft der Gesetzgebung, an attempt to find a new theoretical basis for society in place of the opportunist politics which had led to the cataclysm of the French Revolution. This basis he seemed to discover in something resembling Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism. Zachariae's last work of importance was Vierzig Bücher vom Staate (1839–1842), to which his admirers point as his enduring monument.
The relationship between "Indomania" and "Indophobia" in colonial era British Indology was discussed by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann (1997) who found that Indomania had become a norm in early 19th century Britain as the result of a conscious agenda of Evangelicalism and utilitarianism, especially by Charles Grant and James Mill. Historians noted that during the British Empire, "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom." In Grant's highly influential "Observations on the ...Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" (1796),Grant, Charles. (1796) Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals; and on the means of improving it, written chiefly in the year 1792.
In the past, Singer has not held that objective moral values exist, on the basis that reason could favour both egoism and equal consideration of interests. Singer himself adopted utilitarianism on the basis that people's preferences can be universalised, leading to a situation where one takes the "point of view of the universe" and "an impartial standpoint". But in the Second Edition of Practical Ethics, he concedes that the question of why we should act morally "cannot be given an answer that will provide everyone with overwhelming reasons for acting morally". However, when co-authoring The Point of View of the Universe (2014), Singer shifted to the position that objective moral values do exist, and defends the 19th century utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick's view that objective morality can be derived from fundamental moral axioms that are knowable by reason.
In the 1830s, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, left instructions to be followed upon his death which led to the creation of a sort of modern-day mummy. He asked that his body be displayed to illustrate how the "horror at dissection originates in ignorance"; once so displayed and lectured about, he asked that his body parts be preserved, including his skeleton (minus his skull, which despite being mis-preserved, was displayed beneath his feet until theft required it to be stored elsewhere), which were to be dressed in the clothes he usually wore and "seated in a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought". His body, outfitted with a wax head created because of problems preparing it as Bentham requested, is on open display in the University College London.
Heretics is a collection of 20 essays originally published by G. K. Chesterton in 1905. While the loci of the chapters of Heretics are personalities, the topics he debates are as universal to the "vague moderns" of the 21st century as they were to those of the 20th. He quotes at length and argues against atheist apologist and eugenicist Joseph McCabe extensively, delivers diatribes about his close personal friend and intellectual rival, George Bernard Shaw, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and an array of other major intellectuals of his day, many of whom he knew personally. The topics he touches upon range from cosmology to anthropology to soteriology and he argues against French nihilism, German humanism, English utilitarianism, the syncretism of "the vague modern", Social Darwinism, eugenics and the arrogance and misanthropy of the European intelligentsia.
But this is quite compatible with a full appreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher." Mill says that this appeal to those who have experienced the relevant pleasures is no different from what must happen when assessing the quantity of pleasure, for there is no other way of measuring "the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations." "It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly-endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constitute, is imperfect."John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2 Mill also thinks that "intellectual pursuits have value out of proportion to the amount of contentment or pleasure (the mental state) that they produce.
In an article titled "The Source of Religion", he criticised religion, describing it as "an anachronism today, with our science and understanding". Following the passing of a law in Illinois prescribing that teaching of morals in public schools, in 1912, Moore published three books on ethics to be used as educational material: High-School Ethics, Ethics and Education and The Ethics of School Life—based on a lesson that Moore gave to high-school students. High-School Ethics was intended to form the first part of a four- year course, including topics such as evolution, the ethics of school life and business, the ethical treatment of animals, social justice, eugenics, women's rights and utilitarianism. Moore delivered a speech entitled "Discovering Darwin", at the International Anti-vivisection and Animal protection Congress, held in Washington D.C, in 1913.
Hodgson was educated at Sydney Grammar School from 1950–1956, where he played rugby, served in the cadets, was dux of the school, and topped the state in mathematics I and II. Hodgson attended the University of Sydney with a university and Commonwealth scholarship. He graduated in 1962 with degrees in Arts and Law with first-class honours, the same year as fellow judges Murray Gleeson and Michael Kirby.Michael Kirby, The Supreme Court of NSW, Tradition and Diversity , speech given 12 February 2004 Hodgson then attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, where he completed a Doctor of Philosophy on the topic of utilitarianism which formed the basis of his book, Consequences of Utilitarianism.Who's Who in Australia Hodgson's thesis supervisor, Herbert Hart, described Hodgson as the ablest Doctor of Philosophy student he had ever had.
According to John Rawls, Sidgwick's importance to modern ethics rests with two contributions: providing the most sophisticated defense available of utilitarianism in its classical form, and providing in his comparative methodology an exemplar for how ethics is to be researched as an academic subject. Allen Wood describes Sidgwick-inspired comparative methodology as the "standard model" of research methodology among contemporary ethicists. Despite his importance to contemporary ethicists, Sidgwick's reputation as a philosopher fell precipitously in the decades following his death, and he would be regarded as a minor figure in philosophy for a large part of the first half of the 20th century. Bart Schultz argues that this negative assessment is explained by the tastes of groups which would be influential at Cambridge in the years following Sidgwick's death: Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophers, the remnants of British idealism, and, most importantly, the Bloomsbury Group.
The Council takes the view that its terms of reference do not require it to adopt the same ethical framework or set of principles in all reports. The Council is therefore not bound by the values of particular schools of philosophy (for example, utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics) or approaches in bioethics, such as the 'four principles of bioethics' (autonomy, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence), or the Barcelona Principles (autonomy, dignity, integrity, vulnerability).Nuffield Council on Bioethics: How does the Council ‘do’ ethics? In 2006-7, John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, and Dr Sarah Chan carried out an external review of the way ethical frameworks, principles, norms and guiding concepts feature in the Council's publications.Nuffield Council on Bioethics: An external review of the Council’s ethics The authors found that the ethical frameworks used in the Council's publications had become increasingly explicit and transparent.
Michel Onfray, contemporary hedonist philosopher A dedicated contemporary hedonist philosopher and writer on the history of hedonistic thought is the French Michel Onfray, who has written two books directly on the subject, L'invention du plaisir: fragments cyréaniques and La puissance d'exister : Manifeste hédoniste. He defines hedonism "as an introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else." Onfray's philosophical project is to define an ethical hedonism, a joyous utilitarianism, and a generalized aesthetic of sensual materialism that explores how to use the brain's and the body's capacities to their fullest extent—while restoring philosophy to a useful role in art, politics, and everyday life and decisions."Introductory Note to Onfray by Doug Ireland Onfray's works "have explored the philosophical resonances and components of (and challenges to) science, painting, gastronomy, sex and sensuality, bioethics, wine, and writing.
Two near contemporaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Sade had very different views on these matters. Bentham saw pain and pleasure as objective phenomena, and defined utilitarianism on that principle. However the Marquis de Sade offered a wholly different view - which is that pain itself has an ethics, and that pursuit of pain, or imposing it, may be as useful and just as pleasurable, and that this indeed is the purpose of the state - to indulge the desire to inflict pain in revenge, for instance, via the law (in his time most punishment was in fact the dealing out of pain). The 19th-century view in Europe was that Bentham's view had to be promoted, de Sade's (which it found painful) suppressed so intensely that it - as de Sade predicted - became a pleasure in itself to indulge.
He came into conflict over one of the articles in the "Doctrinal Basis" all teachers were required to sign: "We believe in the eternal punishment of those who have ignored or rejected the offer of salvation". In 1936, the same year one of his pamphlets, "The Last Enemy" appeared, he resigned; in "The Last Enemy", he denounced the "eternal torment" doctrine, saying it was "derogatory to God’s character" because it posited "infinite torture for finite sin". His interpretation had been reviewed by theologians including Samuel H. Wilkinson; Wilkinson said Forbes's arguments were "in harmony with the 'Supreme Authority'". He is the author of The Science of Beauty: An Analytical Inquiry Into the Laws of Æsthetics (1881), summarized thus: "A revival of physiognomy as evolutionary utilitarianism; Forbes lays it down as a law that ugliness consists of subjective disgust and an objective 'suggestion of inutility'(157)".
Popper claimed that "there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure... In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway. A further criticism of the Utilitarian formula "Maximize pleasure" is that it assumes a continuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man's pain by another man's pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all..." The ideas in negative utilitarianism have similarities with ancient traditions such as Jainism and Buddhism.
Godwin's political views were diverse and do not perfectly agree with any of the ideologies that claim his influence; writers of the Socialist Standard, organ of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, consider Godwin both an individualist and a communist;"William Godwin, Shelly and Communism" by ALB, The Socialist Standard anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard did not regard Godwin as an individualist, referring to him as the "founder of communist anarchism";Rothbard, Murray. "Edmund Burke, Anarchist." and historian Albert Weisbord considers him an individualist anarchist without reservation. Some writers see a conflict between Godwin's advocacy of "private judgement" and utilitarianism, as he says that ethics requires that individuals give their surplus property to each other resulting in an egalitarian society, but, at the same time, he insists that all things be left to individual choice. Many of Godwin's views changed over time, as noted by Peter Kropotkin.
They generally propose a political system in which power is entrusted to assemblies of consensually-acknowledged wise men, or to a single wise individual. On the level of geopolitics, to the "unipolarity", the "unipolar" world, created by the mono-ideologies (the Abrahamic religions and their other ideological products) and led by the United States of America-dominated West, the Rodnovers oppose the idea of "multipolarity", of a world of many power centres, well represented by the "Russian Way". In their view, while the unipolar world is characterised by the materialism and selfish utilitarianism of the West, the multipolar world represented by Russia is characterised by spirituality, ecology, humanism and true equality. The idea of Russian multipolarity against Westernising unipolarity is popular among Russian intellectuals, and among Rodnovers it was first formally enunciated in the Russian Pagan Manifesto, published in 1997 by four Russian Rodnover leaders.
In the long run the best proof of a good character is good actions; and resolutely refuse to consider any mental disposition as good, of which the predominant tendency is to produce bad conduct. In the last chapter of Utilitarianism, Mill concludes that justice, as a classifying factor of our actions (being just or unjust) is one of the certain moral requirements, and when the requirements are all regarded collectively, they are viewed as greater according to this scale of "social utility" as Mill puts it. He also notes that, contrary to what its critics might say, there is "no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect…a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation." However, he accepts that this is usually because the intellectual pleasures are thought to have circumstantial advantages, i.e.
In a similar vein, Mill's method of determining the best utility is that a moral agent, when given the choice between two or more actions, ought to choose the action that contributes most to (maximizes) the total happiness in the world. Happiness, in this context, is understood as the production of pleasure or privation of pain. Given that determining the action that produces the most utility is not always so clear cut, Mill suggests that the utilitarian moral agent, when attempting to rank the utility of different actions, should refer to the general experience of persons. That is, if people generally experience more happiness following action X than they do action Y, the utilitarian should conclude that action X produces more utility than, and is thus favorable to, action Y. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethical theory, meaning that it holds that acts are justified insofar as they produce a desirable outcome.
Over the past 70+ years, Hemas has created daily moments of joy through a portfolio of products and services that delights in its utilitarianism; practiced a more robust version of health that moves beyond the absence of illness; and championed a more inclusive world that celebrates equal opportunity, integration and harmony. These actions have enabled the Group to offer meaningful interventions to all the stakeholders they serve and to showcase Sri Lankan products on the world stage. Today, Hemas is a public quoted company listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange with over 4,000 shareholders, and is regarded as one of the most respected and transparent companies in Sri Lanka and Asia's Most Socially Responsible Company. On 25 June 2020, Kasturi Chellaraja Wilson was appointed as the CEO of Hemas Holdings and will replace Steven Enderby as the CEO with effect from 1 October 2020 as a part of the company's succession plan.
The government's plans for the coronation attracted considerable criticism from its opponents. For different reasons, both the Tories and the Radicals objected to the coronation being turned into a day of popular celebration, to be seen by as wide a public as possible. The Tory objections, mostly made beforehand, were that the government's plans to put much of the spending into the long public procession detracted from the traditional dignity of the ceremonies at Westminster, which would be "shorn of majesty by Benthamite utilitarianism".. The Radical left, including the Chartist movement which was largely anti-monarchist, thought the whole occasion far too expensive.. A dubious perception that prevailed was the identification of the new monarch with the Whig party. This would be a problem through the early years of Victoria's reign, leading to the so-called Bedchamber Crisis in 1839 over what were at the time considered to be the political nature of the appointments of her ladies-in-waiting.
Total utilitarianism, or totalism, aims to maximize the total sum of wellbeing in the world, as constituted by the number of individuals multiplied by their average quality of life. Consequently, totalists hold that a state of affairs can be improved either by increasing the average wellbeing level of the existing population or by increasing the population size through the addition of individuals with positive wellbeing. Greaves formally defines totalism as follows: A state of affairs "A is better than B iff total well- being in A is higher than total well-being in B. A and B are equally good iff total well-being in A is equal to total well-being in B." Totalism mathematically leads to an implication, which many people find counterintuitive. In his Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit was among the first to spell out and popularize this implication in the academic literature, coining it the "repugnant conclusion".
It is difficult to imagine the intellectual concern of late 19th and early 20th Century over the collective drift in Western Civilization away from old-guard monarchial and hierarchical societal structures (i.e., one's station in life being determined primarily by birth), toward the relative uncertainty and instability embodied in such Enlightenment Era ideals such as democracy, nationhood, class struggle (Karl Marx), human equality, humanism, egalitarianism, utilitarianism and the like. As such, Ressentiment, as a phenomenon, was first viewed as a pseudo-ethically based political force enabling the lower classes of society to rise in their situation in life at the (perceived) expense of the higher, or more inherently "noble" classes. Hence, Ressentiment first emerged as, what some might view, a reactionary and elitist concept by today's democratic standards; while others of a more conservative mind-set might view Ressentiment as liberalism disguised as a socialist attempt at usurping the role of individual responsibility and self- determination.
It would be necessary to make the laws of the Institution on such a basis as would tend to encourage those manufactures adapted to colonial wants, and involve the development of colonial resources. A School of Art and Design would obtain a wider scope for its usefulness, and combine with a cultivation of graceful tastes an element of utilitarianism suited to the present position and future growth of the colony. Again, the proposed lectures or discourses on art might be made of immense benefit, if the topics discussed were not simply confined to a description of 'the line of beauty,' or the peculiarities of a classical profile. We imagine that the subjects, if selected with a view to the exposition of manufactures, agriculture, and chemistry, and the adaptability they would bear to colonial uses, would afford an attraction to every class in the community, and secure for the Society the popular support.
A Dyson > vacuum cleaner may well be purchased at least in part because of its design, > but I would require some evidence were it to be said that the design > preference of the customer for this piece of household utilitarianism would > lead the customer to require it to keep its looks after a repair in the same > way as a car is required to keep its looks. This is, I accept, somewhat > speculative in the absence of solid evidence, but it is plausible and I > certainly cannot find that that is wrong and Qualtex has not discharged its > burden of showing it is right. In denying Qualtex's appeal, the court concluded: > The overall lesson here is that the exceptions to UDR created by the Act do > not give a carte blanche for pattern spares. Those who wish to make spares > during the period of design right must design their own spares and cannot > just copy every detail of the OEM's part.
Like Aristotle, Sidgwick believed that systematic reflection on ethics should begin with the way ordinary people think about moral behavior—what he calls “commonsense morality.” His main goal in the Methods is to offer a systematic and precise “examination, at once expository and critical, of the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done which are found—either explicit or implicit—in the moral consciousness of mankind generally” (Methods, p. vii). His focus is primarily on detailed exposition of commonsense morality; he does not attempt to defend any particular theory of ethics, including utilitarianism, which he explicitly endorses in other works and speaks positively of in many passages in the Methods. However, Sidgwick’s goal is not simply exposition; he also wants to clarify, systematize, and improve ordinary morality by noting points where it is vague, undeveloped, or inharmonious, and then suggesting ways that these problems can be fixed.
Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".. On the other hand, George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, wrote: "There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'." Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it destroyed middle-class polemics about criminals, making any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed impossible... Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) is set in a small Midlands industrial town and particularly criticizes the effect of Utilitarianism on the lives of cities' working classes. John Ruskin declared Hard Times his favourite Dickens work due to its exploration of important social questions.
"If I am forced against my will into a situation where people will die, and I have no ability to stop it, how is my choice a "moral" choice between meaningfully different options, as opposed to a horror show I've just been thrust into, in which I have no meaningful agency at all?" In her 2017 paper published in the Science, Technology, and Human Values, Nassim JafariNaimi lays out the reductive nature of the trolley problem in framing ethical problems that serves to uphold an impoverished version of utilitarianism. She argues that the popular argument that the trolley problem can serve as a template for algorithmic morality is based on fundamentally flawed premises that serve the most powerful with potentially dire consequences on the future of cities. In 2017, in his book On Human Nature, Roger Scruton criticises the usage of ethical dilemmas such as the trolley problem and their usage by philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer as ways of illustrating their ethical views.
49–52, 136 The Belgian philosopher of law Frank van Dun is one among those who are elaborating a secular conception of natural law in the liberal tradition. Libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard argues that "the very existence of a natural law discoverable by reason is a potentially powerful threat to the status quo and a standing reproach to the reign of blindly traditional custom or the arbitrary will of the State apparatus." Ludwig von Mises states that he relaid the general sociological and economic foundations of the liberal doctrine upon utilitarianism, rather than natural law, but R. A. Gonce argues that "the reality of the argument constituting his system overwhelms his denial." Murray Rothbard, however, says that Gonce makes a lot of errors and distortions in the analysis of Mises's works, including making confusions about the term which Mises uses to refer to scientific laws, "laws of nature", saying it characterizes Mises as a natural law philosopher.
As editor-in-chief of Webster's New International Dictionary (1909), he originated the divided page. In the book The Educational Philosophy of William T. Harris by Richard D. Mosier, it is stated that Harris forms the bridge between the mechanism, associationism, and utilitarianism of the 18th century and the pragmatism, experimentalism, and instrumentalism of the 20th century. William Torrey Harris took Bacon’s original ideas on the organization of information for libraries and modernized them to be applied in the United States by the second half of the 1800s. William Harris, who worked creating a library catalog for the Public Library School of St. Louis, wrote an essay on creating an organization system for libraries. It wasn’t the first one in America, but it was an scheme that gained international reputation rapidly. Harris used a deductive hierarchy and created a structure better adapted to the interrelation of knowledge, which facilitated its application in libraries’ catalogs.
Kagan suggests that such a procedure might be justified on the grounds that "a general requirement to promote the good would lack the motivational underpinning necessary for genuine moral requirements" and, secondly, that personal independence is necessary for the existence of commitments and close personal relations and that "the value of such commitments yields a positive reason for preserving within moral theory at least some moral independence for the personal point of view." Robert Goodin takes yet another approach and argues that the demandingness objection can be "blunted" by treating utilitarianism as a guide to public policy rather than one of individual morality. He suggests that many of the problems arise under the traditional formulation because the conscientious utilitarian ends up having to make up for the failings of others and so contributing more than their fair share. Gandjour specifically considers market situations and analyses whether individuals who act in markets may produce a utilitarian optimum.
Flower first came to public notice, however, within the Psalmody MovementPart of a wider musical/social phenomenon broadly constructed around the philosophical idealism of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi modified, however by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. See Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman Music in the British Provinces 1690-1914 (Ashgate, 2007; Bernarr Rainbow 1970, The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church (1839–1872). (London, Barrie & Jenkins) of the 1830s and 40s in London when, on 4 November 1839, the Musical World noted that Sara and her sister Elizabeth had both appeared at a lecture given at the Hoxton National School Room in inner North London by Charles Henry Purday (1799–1885), engaged, presumably, in order to demonstrate the argument of Purday's lecture, entitled, 'The Proper Object of Music'.The title of the lecture is an echo of the title of the 1824 Quarterly Musical Magazine [QMMR] article on a work of 1807 by Guillaume André Villoteau.
The ND has gone through several doctrinal renewals since its creation in 1968 and, according to political scientist Stéphane François, "it has never been a centralized and homogeneous school of dogmatic thought. The positions supported by New Right thinkers vary enormously, ranging from extreme right wing to variants of anarchism. Despite these, ... GRECE and ex-GRECE thinkers are united by common doctrinal references." Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff has distinguished five ideological periods within the history of the ND: the rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage and the ethnocentric "religion of human rights"; a critique of the liberal and socialist "egalitarian utopias" in the 1970s; a praise of the "Indo-European heritage" and paganism, perceived as the "true religion" of the Europeans; a critique of a market-driven and "economist" vision of the world and liberal utilitarianism; the advocacy of a radical ethnic differentialism, eventually evolving in the 1990s towards a cultural relativism inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Robert Jaulin.
Subsequently: Routley, Richard and Routley, Val (1979), "Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism" in K.E. Goodpaster and K.M. Sayre (eds), Ethics and the Problems of the 21st Century, Notre Dame University Press: South Bend, Indiana; Routley, R. and V. (1980), "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics" in D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (eds), Environmental Philosophy, Department of Philosophy Monograph Series #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, pp. 96-189; Routley, R. and Routley, V. (1980), "Destructive Forestry in Melanesia and Australia", The Ecologist 10: 56–67; Routley, R. and Routley, V. (1985), "An Expensive Repair-Kit for Utilitarianism", Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #7, Department of Philosophy, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University: Canberra, pp. 21-55; and Sylvan, R. (1994), "Mucking With Nature" in Against the Main Stream: Critical Environmental Essayes, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #20, Department of Philosophy, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University: Canberra. and he co-authored the 1994 book The Greening of Ethics with David Bennett.
A stained glass window of Thomas Aquinas in St. Joseph's Catholic Church (Central City, Kentucky) Many modern ethicists both within and outside the Catholic Church (notably Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre) have recently commented on the possible use of Thomas's virtue ethics as a way of avoiding utilitarianism or Kantian "sense of duty" (called deontology). Through the work of twentieth-century philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe (especially in her book Intention), Thomas's principle of double effect specifically and his theory of intentional activity generally have been influential. In recent years the cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman proposes that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics, in a 2008 article in the journal Mind and Matter titled "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas". Henry Adams's Mont Saint Michel and Chartres ends with a culminating chapter on Thomas, in which Adams calls Thomas an "artist" and constructs an extensive analogy between the design of Thomas's "Church Intellectual" and that of the gothic cathedrals of that period.
The trip took them to 19 universities in the American northeast, as well as to Paris, Lyon, Oxford, Berlin, Hamburg, and numerous other European cities, all in an effort to discern the best possible building structure. The architectural tendencies of the era, however, ended up having a greater influence than the academics' visits to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, La Sorbonne or the University of Berlin; while the final plans from this period are hardly recognizable to anyone familiar with the contemporary campus, the buildings from the era that managed to survive the design revisions, the Civil War and the Franco regime betray the period's fondness for the German Bauhaus movement. Indeed, the original buildings, exemplary amongst them the Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy and Odontology, are an homage to structural functionalism and the graceful utilitarianism of the 1920s. In the 1970s, following the political instability of the regime of Francisco Franco, the University of Madrid was renamed, dividing existing colleges between the Complutense University of Madrid and the Technical University of Madrid.
Average utilitarianism, or averagism, aims only to improve the average wellbeing level, without regard for the number of individuals in existence. Averagism avoids the repugnant conclusion, because it holds that, in contrast to totalism, reductions in the average wellbeing level can never be compensated for by adding more people to the population. Greaves defines averagism formally as follows: A state of affairs "A is better than B iff average well- being in A is higher than average well-being in B. A and B are equally good iff average well-being in A is equal to average well-being in B." Averagism has never been widely embraced by philosophers, because it leads to counterintuitive implications said to be "at least as serious" as the repugnant conclusion. In particular, Parfit shows that averagism leads to the conclusion that a population of just one person is better than any large population—say, the 7.7 billion people alive today—as long as the average wellbeing level of the single person is slightly higher than of the large group of people.
In his essay Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill writes of greed for money that: > the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human > life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to > possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on > increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be > compassed by it, are falling off. It may be then said truly, that money is > desired not for the sake of an end, but as part of the end. From being a > means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the > individual's conception of happiness. The same may be said of the majority > of the great objects of human life—power, for example, or fame; except that > to each of these there is a certain amount of immediate pleasure annexed, > which has at least the semblance of being naturally inherent in them; a > thing which cannot be said of money.
Dewey visited the Kodokan on 31 March 1919. For Dewey's thoughts on Kanō's methods, see John Dewey and Alice Chipman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, edited by Evelyn Dewey (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1920), pp. 93–94. Kanō's manner had the desired effect upon the students, but the administration was slower to warm to his methods and it was not until the arrival of a new principal that Kanō's ideas found acceptance. All this is to say that Kanō's educational philosophy was a combination of both traditional Japanese neo-Confucianism and contemporary European and American philosophies, to include Instrumentalism, Utilitarianism, and "evolutionary progressivism", as Social Darwinism was then known. The goals of Kanō's educational philosophies and methods (indeed, the goals of most Japanese educational programs of the early 20th century) were: to develop minds, bodies, and spirits in equal proportion; to increase patriotism and loyalty, especially to the Emperor; to teach public morality; and to increase physical strength and stamina, especially for the purpose of making young men more fit for military service.
Anthem Press. 2012. . In this sense, James' pragmatic influencer Peirce establishes that what counts as a practical consequence or effect is what can affect one's senses and what is comprehendible and fathomable in the natural world. Yet James never “[works] out his understanding of ‘practical consequences’ as fully as Peirce did,” nor does he limit these consequences to the senses like Peirce. It then raises the question: what does it mean to be practical? Whether James means the greatest number of positive consequences (in light of utilitarianism), a consequence that considers other perspectives (like his compromise of the tender and tough ways of thinking), or a completely different take altogether, it is unclear to truly tell what consequence truly fits the pragmatic standard, and what doesn’t. The closest James is able to get in explaining this idea is by telling his audience to weigh the difference it would “practically make to anyone” if one opinion over the other were true, and although he attempts to clarify it, he never specifies nor establishes the method in which one would weigh the difference between one opinion over the other.
Most atheists argue that no religious basis is necessary for one to live an ethical life. They assert that atheists are as motivated towards moral behavior as anyone, or more, citing a range of non-theistic sources of moral behavior including: parental love, their conventional (or advanced) educated upbringing, natural empathy, compassion and the humane concern; respect for social norms, criminal law stemming from natural law, police or other enforced order (and in some cases society); and a desire for a good reputation and self-esteem. According to this view, ethical behavior is a natural consequence of altruistic motivation, not stemming from divine or tenet-prescribed system of punishment or reward in life and/or after death, though experiences and tentative expectations may instead play a role in forming and strengthening a moral atheist's motivations and ethics, united in rejection of any theory of all human beings' afterlife. Thus while atheism does not entail any particular moral philosophy, many atheists are drawn towards philosophies and worldviews such as: secular humanism, empiricism, objectivism, or utilitarianism, which provide a moral framework that is not founded on faith in deities.
Schultz has taught in the College at the University of Chicago since October 1, 1987, having designed a wide range of core courses as well as courses on Teaching Precollegiate Philosophy, Consequentialism from Bentham to Singer, Philosophy and Public Education, The Philosophy of Poverty, John Dewey, The Chicago School of Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Philosophies of Environmentalism and Sustainability, and Philosophy of Happiness. He has published widely in Philosophy. He is a contributing editor to Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992), Utilitarianism and Empire (Lexington, 2005), with G. Varouxakis, Proceedings of the World Congress--University of Catania on H. Sidgwick: Happiness and Religion (Catania: Universita degli Studi di Catania, 2007), with P. Bucolo and R. Crisp, Proceedings of the World Congress-- University of Catania on H. Sidgwick II: Ethics, Psychics, and Politics (Catania: Universita degli Studi di Catania, 2011), with P. Bucolo and R. Crisp, and various journal symposia, including the Book Symposium on Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (Etica & Politica, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (Trieste: University of Trieste, April 2016)), with original contributions by Roger Crisp, Brad Hooker, Derek Parfit, and Mariko Nakano, and replies by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer.
Shirzad Peik Herfeh was born on 22 February 1980 in Rasht, Northern Iran, and obtained his bachelor in the fields of English language and litreture from Shiraz University, his master in philosophy in Imam Khomeini International University and his PhD in philosophy on 13 January 2010 from Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran. He has worked as a lecturer in several universities in Tehran, including Allameh Tabataba'i University. He was also an interpreter at several bilingual philosophical conferences, such as “International Conference on Religious Epistemology”, “International Conference on Mulla Sadra & Transcendent Philosophy” and “International Conference on Two Hundred Years after Kant.” He has worked as a researcher, translator, and interpreter for Iranian philosophical institutes like “Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies”, “Iranian Institute of Philosophy,” and “Sadra Islamic Philosophy Institute.” Now, he is a faculty member and assistant professor of department of philosophy at Imam Khomeini International University (IKIU), Qazvin, Iran. He has published more than 20 books and research papers, including The Limits of Morality (Tehran, Ney, 2012), An Analysis and Critique of Classical and Modern Types of Utilitarianism (Tehran, Negah-e Mo’aser, 2015), and Persian translation of Julia Driver’s Consequentialism (Tehran, Hekmat, 2015), and J. R. Weinstein’s On Adam Smith (Tehran, IHCS, 2013).

No results under this filter, show 666 sentences.

Copyright © 2024 RandomSentenceGen.com All rights reserved.