The dominant approach in pre-Rawls political philosophy was
utilitarianism: how can we maximize the satisfaction of people's preferences?
Thus, from the ethical perspective of
utilitarianism and in combination with the requirement of parental permission and
The respondents identified whether or not the action involved a questionable moral issue (moral sensitivity to recognize a moral issue) by indicating their belief about whether the action was ethical and whether they would complete each action on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from 1 as "ethical" to 7 as "unethical." The Multidimensional Ethics Scale was used to identify how one rates each action in the vignette related to philosophical values of justice, deontology,
utilitarianism, relativism, and egoism.
Fletcher argues that to accept welfare-maximizing
utilitarianism and its penchant for cost/benefit analysis "presupposes that a collective decision-maker can and must determine the community's welfare regardless of the preferences of the affected individuals.
Motive
utilitarianism is liable to the most extreme of counterexamples; it can be argued that "An industrialist's greed, a general's bloodthirstiness, may on some occasions have better consequences on the whole than kinder motives would, and even predictably so" (Adams 480).
Layard's account of economic success as "pollution" is a striking illustration of what the philosopher John Rawls had in mind when he argued that
utilitarianism fails to take seriously the separateness of persons.
In chapter three, the author confronts one of the two most troubling issues concerning Mill's
utilitarianism, namely the quality/quantity distinction or distinctions.
Because here the TSBPA is referring so clearly to values, it implies a bias toward
utilitarianism.
Although early Victorian Britain is usually regarded as the heyday of laissez-faire economics, it was also the age of Factory Laws and
utilitarianism. How to reconcile that conundrum is the important task F.
Meilaender contemplated only one way in which a utilitarian imperative might overwhelm the sort of sanctions that lead to moral bans: following Michael Walzer's ruminations about just war theory, he allowed that some circumstances generate a "
utilitarianism of extremity," in which an enemy simply must be defeated because it poses "an ultimate threat to everything decent in our lives" (Walzer's words).
Much like in any introductory philosophy class, covering the three major ethical theories (virtue ethics, deontology and
utilitarianism) is vital.
The most prominent of the consequentialist theories is
utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is a teleological, goal-directed theory--emphasizing happiness or the greatest good for the greatest number as the end result of human action.
