Utility ethical principle1/11/2024 At the very least, checking our moral and political views against utilitarian principles may help us to avoid and overcome some of our own biases. This provides us with some reason to expect that when today’s “common sense” moral intuitions conflict with utilitarian conclusions, the latter are more likely to be correct. That is, utilitarianism led the early utilitarians to many conclusions which struck people as counterintuitive at the time but which most of us now understand as right. Utilitarianism enabled Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick to make better moral “predictions” than those who endorsed alternative moral views. While the early proponents of utilitarianism were still far from getting everything right, their utilitarian reasoning led them to escape many of their time’s moral prejudices and develop more enlightened moral views. The classical utilitarians of the 18th and 19th centuries- Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick-had social and political attitudes that were far ahead of their time. Utilitarian moral reasoning has a strong track record of contributing to humanity’s collective moral progress. → Main article: Arguments in favor of utilitarianism: Track record Arguments in favor of utilitarianism: track record It is simple and clear, and it provides concrete implications for how to act in any situation. Utilitarianism has strong theoretical virtues as an ethical theory. → Main article: Arguments for utilitarianism Arguments in favor of utilitarianism: theoretical virtues Aggregationism is one of the four elements of utilitarian ethical theories. 3 When combined with welfarism and the equal consideration of interests, this view implies that we can meaningfully add up the well-being of different individuals, and use this total to determine which trade-offs are worth making. 2 AggregationismĪggregationism holds that the value of the world is the sum of the values of its parts, where these parts are local phenomena such as experiences, lives, or societies. Contemporary utilitarian philosophers often endorse global utilitarianism, which emphasizes that utilitarian standards of moral evaluation apply to anything of interest (not just acts). 1 Act utilitarianism is the best known version of direct consequentialism and is often contrasted with rule utilitarianism, an indirect consequentialist view. Act utilitarianismĪct utilitarianism is the view that one morally ought to promote just the sum total of well-being. This page provides an overview with brief descriptions of key utilitarian terms and relevant links.
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