Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
Rosen (2003) warns that descriptions of utilitarianism can bear "little resemblance historically to utilitarians like Bentham and J. S. Mill" and can be more "a crude version of act utilitarianism conceived in the twentieth century as a straw man to be attacked and rejected." [25] It is a mistake to think that Bentham is not concerned with ...
Two-level utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics according to which 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.
Utilitarianism is an 1861 essay written by English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, considered to be a classic exposition and defense of utilitarianism in ethics. It was originally published as a series of three separate articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 before it was collected and reprinted as a single work in 1863. [1]
According to Bentham, seven factors should be considered in weighing the value of a pleasure or pain: its intensity, its duration, its degree of certainty, its propinquity or remoteness, its fecundity (i.e., its tendency to produce further pleasures or pains), its purity (i.e., whether it is purely pleasurable or painful, or is mixed with its ...
Brandt believed that moral rules should be considered in sets which he called moral codes. A moral code is justified when it is the optimal code that, if adopted and followed, would maximise the public good more than any alternative code would. The codes may be society-wide standards or special codes for a profession like engineering. [11]
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote "The principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number was as inimical to the idea of liberty as to the idea of rights." [93] Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J. J. C. Smart) is often criticised for lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice.
Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics that 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. [1]