Mark Smith

Utilitarianism essay

Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism states that when you make a decision, you should make this decision on how many people will receive pleasure or happiness from this decision. Bentham said that good was happiness. He believed that motives are unimportant and that only consequences count. He argued that motives can not be measured but consequences can. Utilitarianism is not based on religion but on consequences of an action, or thought and reason. Therefore a person can ignore rules and tradition when making a decision. Bentham states, “Morality is not a matter of pleasing God, nor is it a matter of faithfulness to abstract rules. Morality is nothing more then an attempt to bring about as much happiness as possible to the world.” Utilitarianism is based on teleology which identifies a theory which is not based on rules. Utilitarianism in it’s simplest form can be summed up by the phrase, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”  E.g. most people like eating crisps and a minority likes eating oranges based Benthams theory everybody would have to eat crisps as the majority prefer crisps. Bentham believed that it is simply the quantity of pleasures that counts and that all pleasures had equal value and that one pleasure is no better then another. E.g. Playing chess has the same pleasure value as eating crisps.

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The hedonic calculus was developed as a way of measuring the amounts of pleasure and pain according to seven criteria:

  1. It’s intensity
  2. It’s duration
  3. It’s certainty or uncertainty
  4. It’s propinquity or remoteness
  5. It’s fecundity or the chance of it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind.
  6. It’s purity or the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the opposite kind.
  7. It’s extent, the number of people it will extend to.

You could apply the hedonic calculus to a moral dilemma e.g. there was a bus that crashed with ...

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