Assess utilitarianism?

Question

What points would you suggest when answering this question? if you have a documented file on this topic would you kindly let me be aware of it.

Answer 1

Utilitarianism is basically the idea that the best actions are those that bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people. To assess this view, you would first have to figure out how to determine what is "good" and how can it be quantified – in other words, assigned some value that allows you to compare this value to other goods. So, for example, assuming that happiness is good, is the happiness I experience from winning a million dollars equal to the overall happiness of a million people each winning 1 dollar? Can we quantify happiness in this way? Most likely I would be happier winning a million dollars than you would be winning 1 dollar, but does it makes sense to say that I am a million times happier? Children often experience stronger emotions that adults (personally, I can't think of very many joys in my adult life that compare to the utterly unbridled joy of seeing a pile of presents under the tree on Christmas morning when I was a kid). So perhaps a child could be happier winning a dollar than I would be if I won a million dollars. So how would I count children's happiness in the utilitarian calculus? Also, is the trill of receiving money comparable to the trill of getting a kiss from someone you love? And so on. The basic idea is that we don't really know how to compare the relative values of "goodness".

Answer 2

In addition to the fine response above, note that utilitarianism is a sort of consequentialism . . . where the moral value of an action depends on its consequences or results.

One way to refute consequentialism is to state that we can never know what the consequences of any of our actions will be.

Moreover, with the shifts of time, it would seem that every action would be good or bad and shift back and forth depending on a given future moment in time, since all actions set in place a series of actions that sometimes are rather reactive to one another. So, I could punch a man. That seems to make my action bad because it caused pain for some fellow (given that we cannot speak of intrinsically just or unjust actions). Yet, say that this punch caused the man to go to the hospital, where he had an an X-Ray. Because of this X-Ray, the man discovered that he had a malignant cancerous tumor. The man then had the tumor removed. So, it turned out that my punch saved his life. But then, the man gets depressed five years later (when he would have been dead had I not punched him), and goes on a shooting spree. My punch then becomes a seed of a mass murder.

See how this is goofy? It seems strange that an act could go from good to bad to good to bad . . . and so this system doesn't seem to tell us whether or not an action is good or bad.

Answer 3

There are many good writers on this topic, and many times in real life where a Utilitarian approach s adopted. Do a google search on it, as many scholarly articles are on the web.