Another strength is that it’s a common sense system, that’s practically applicable to real life situations it has no need for any special wisdom, also theses benefits are considerable, as they signify a working morality that can be brought into operation, in organisational rather than simply helping one individual. One could envisage the benefits of using utilitarianism that could be put into practice in the management of a hospital. For an example to buy a machine that would save one persons life a month, and buying a machine that would help or save 50 people a week, budgets should be best used to alleviate the suffering of many. The theory of utilitarianism seems to be reasonable to link morality with the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain and misery this connection would receive popular support.
Other strength for utilitarianism is that its reasonable, you can take into account situation and actions in everyday life and relate them to utilitarianism and find that its an reasonable argument and you can see where its coming from, its also a popular argument people will be in favor of maximizing pleasure and to minus the pain, if the argument id popular then more and more people will follow it. Another main strength Is that its democratic and is practical it has not got loads of confusing theories of why utilitarianism is what it is, its easy to follow and understand.
Utilitarianism can be used by organizations not just individuals this is another strength because if a hospital or any other organization needed to make a decision on what is best they could refer to utilitarianism and see that its about pleasing the majority not the minority. A quote by Jeremy Bentham can refer to this he said ‘’greatest good by the greatest number’’ it’s better to help the greatest number of people than the least.
However there are some problems with utilitarianism, like how can we be sure of the consequences at the end of each action or situation, how can we actually measure please or pain? Some people may that pain is good for us, there are also different view about what happiness is. There are problems for utilitarianism others may say that it is too simplistic.
Identify the main problems with utilitarianism. To what extent do those make utilitarianism unacceptable?
There are a lot of benefits to utilitarianism like the reasonability or the argument and how popular it is how many people agree with what utilitarian offers, and how it is put across. The argument is practical and is basically common sense; you can relate it to everyday actions and situation. But there are also a lot of weakness’ to go with the argument.
Some of the main weakness’ of the argument are ‘how can we be sure of the consequences’? Of the situation, if we try to make one person happy how do we know that its not going to make another person unhappy, personally you cannot please everyone and that is what utilitarianism is trying to do, this makes utilitarianism unacceptable because you cant possibly make everyone around you happy. Also how do we measure pleasure, pleasure can be different for individuals, what counts as pleasure to one person may be total dislike to another, therefore utilitarianism can not be applied to this situation.
A weakness off utilitarianism is that we should minimize pain, some people argue that pain is good for us, for example, if you stop a child from running up and down the stairs and just carrying them, they wouldn’t no the consequence of what could happen if something went wrong, they could fall and hurt themselves, but if they just let the child fall they would no never to do it again and be painful, if we didn’t experience pain we would be vulnerable to the outside world. There are also different views on what happiness is therefore to make one person happy may not make another happy, this excludes utilitarianism because you cannot make everyone happy because happiness is experienced on different levels and standards.
Other criticisms towards utilitarianism is there’s no credit to motivation, the argument is too simplistic, its understandable but its not as straight forward in real life, things cant be right one day and not the next, it has difficulty of not being ‘’agent relative’’ a person making decisions in a group and not focusing on an individual. Kant says ‘people should always be treated as ends in themselves’
Overall utilitarianism is not helpful, just by making the majority happy, still leaves a minority unhappy, and surely this cant be right, we should try and please everyone, to help the greatest numbers isn’t the greatest good because there is always a conscience about the minority who have to suffer to be unhappy, for example if a teacher in class asked how the pupils concentrated more by sitting in row are groups and if the majority of pupils said in rows the teacher would take that into consideration but there would still be other unhappy, surely you should try and make everyone happy the way the teacher could have was to sit people in rows and people in groups to suit everybody’s needs?