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Topic: Utilitarian ethics

Related Topics

Utilitarianism

Ethics

Utilitarian bioethics

Moral philosophy

Consequentialism

Theory of conduct

Ethics in religion

Morality

Business ethics

Value

Categorical imperative

Virtue ethics

Felicific calculus

Ethics in the Bible

Deontology

	Ethics
		Ethics is the general term for attempts to state or determine what is good, both for the individual and for the society as a whole.
		Ethics has been applied to family structure, sexuality, and how society views the roles of individuals; leading to several distinct and unrelated fields of applied ethics, including feminism.
		There are several sub-branches of applied ethics examining the ethical problems of different professions, such as business ethics, medical ethics, engineering ethics and legal ethics, while technology assessment and environmental assessment study the effects and implications of new technologies or projects on nature and society.
	www.gamesinathens.com /olympics/e/et/ethics_1.shtml (1939 words)

	Utilitarian Bioethics
		The proposal that utilitarian ethicists should resort to the techniques of Madison Avenue to educate the wider community is likely to be met with a fastidious shudder of distaste - or outright incredulity - by (most) professional philosophers.
		Further, not all abolitionists are utilitarians; and it may be unwise to imply that commitment to the eradication of suffering is the exclusive prerogative of one contested ethical theory.
		Practical ethics becomes, in theory, a rigorous, exact, and mathematically quantifiable discipline - though this aspiration remains a pipe-dream even as neuroscientists elucidate the molecular substrates of happiness, sadness and other "core" emotions (anger, fear, disgust, surprise, etc.) in the brain.
	www.utilitarianism.net /biotech.html (2883 words)

	Utilitarian Ethics
		North's method of justifying his acts of deception is a form of moral reasoning that is called "utilitarianism." Stripped down to its essentials, utilitarianism is a moral principle that holds that the morally right course of action in any situation is the one that produces the greatest balance of benefits over harms for everyone affected.
		Utilitarianism offers a relatively straightforward method for deciding the morally right course of action for any particular situation we may find ourselves in.
		Utilitarians also differ in their views about the kind of question we ought to ask ourselves when making an ethical decision.
	www.scu.edu /SCU/Centers/Ethics/publications/iie/v2n1/calculating.html (1226 words)

	Lying and Ethics
		Utilitarians base their reasoning on the claim that actions, including lying, are morally acceptable when the resulting consequences maximize benefit or minimize harm.
		Utilitarianism, in this example, supports the son's decision on the determination that the greater good is served (i.e., overall net benefit is achieved) by lying.
		Again, utilitarianism would seem to support the doctor's decision because the greater good is served by her altruistic lie.
	www.scu.edu /ethics/publications/iie/v6n1/lying.html (1474 words)

	Consequentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		Furthermore, a utilitarian criterion of right implies that it would not be morally right to use the principle of utility as a decision procedure in cases where it would not maximize utility to try to calculate utilities before acting.
		Some utilitarians bite the bullet and say that Alice's act was morally wrong, but it was blameless wrongdoing, because her motives were good, and she was not responsible, given that she could not have foreseen that her act would cause harm.
		Similarly, critics of utilitarianism often argue that utilitarians cannot be good friends, because a good friend places more weight on the welfare of his or her friends than on the welfare of strangers, but utilitarianism requires impartiality among all people.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/consequentialism (9972 words)

	Virtue Ethics and Military Leadership
		Virtue ethics avoids most dilemmas because the focus is no longer on deciding between two unfortunate outcomes or two conflicting rules, but on being a certain kind of person.
		One of the consequences of utilitarianism is that the lieutenant would actually be able to conclude that torturing the civilian was a morally obligated act if he concluded that rescuing his men maximized military necessity.
		Virtue ethics allows him to conclude that this may be the morally best course of action, but not that the results of the action are morally good.
	www.accts.org /ministries/ethics/latvia/Papers/Virtue_ethics.htm (7417 words)

	Catholic Physician's Guild of Chicago: Medical Ethics
		The ethic that guided physicians for 2500 years: the beneficence ethic, arose from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics in which the good life of man was the result of his development of virtues or habits of correct behavior.
		Modern science is forcing traditional medical ethics to confront the dilemma of utilitarian ethics and to realize that it is inherently flawed.
		Ethics requires an understanding of the philosophy of knowledge and the human person.
	www.cathmsa.org /chicago/MedicalEthics.html (768 words)

	Cosmic Ethics and the Meaning of Life (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		State ethics is a sort of synthesis between Utilitarian ethics (the happiness of the greatest number) and the ethics of Plato.
		State Ethics can also be based, in part, on the prevailing religious ethic which is accepted, or is believed to be accepted, by the majority of people of a certain nation, State, or country.
		For Kantian ethics, the individual relates to a transcendent pure Reason (basically, a mystical conception of God), from whom the purpose and meaning of life is derived, as it is with religious ethics.
	www.geocities.com /davidmyatt/ethics-life.html (2349 words)

	Conventional ethics
		But it is often difficult to include utilitarian concerns in environmental analysis because it is difficult to calculate long-term negative environmental impacts, while it is easier to calculate short-term economic benefits.
		Nature law ethics is one of the major approaches in ethical theory developed by Aristotle and by medieval theologians, and it is similar to views found in Chinese thought.
		In virtue ethics, morality is an essential part of one’s personality and disposition; it includes both actions and attitudes and is your basic way of relating to the world.
	www.uwosh.edu /faculty_staff/barnhill/ES_375/ethics.html (1172 words)

	Utilitarian Ethics (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Utilitarianism is part of a larger family of ethical theories called "consequentialism," and consequentialism is the view that whether an act is right or wrong is determined, directly or indirectly, by the act's consequences and not by its intrinsic features, or the doing of the act (McInerney and Rainbolt 1994).
		Utilitarianism was a social reform movement and ethical theory which held that the morality of an act should be judged solely on the basis of results, and as such, was more of a political philosophy than an ethical one.
		Singer's ideas are sometimes called a combination of classical and "preference utilitarianism," although a better term might be "evolutionary utilitarianism" since Singer is also known for some rather extreme viewpoints on bioethics, such as euthanasia (mercy killing of mentally defective infants) and vegetarianism.
	faculty.ncwc.edu /toconnor/415/415lect07.htm (2282 words)

	I (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		If the lieutenant were a utilitarian, he might reason that he makes his platoon happy, the two men on the hill very happy, and accomplishes his mission if he gets the civilian to cooperate, even though that might involve violating the laws of war.
		Consequentialist and utilitarian ethics are predicated on some sort of calculus in which it is necessary to account for the happiness and misery each act creates.
		When the calculations of utilitarianism fail to yield a good course of action and when adhering to duty becomes unclear or conflicts with our intuitions of what is right, it is the leader of good character who stands the best chance to determine the most ethical course of action.
	www.usafa.af.mil /jscope/JSCOPE98/PFAFF98.htm (10857 words)

	The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
		Utilitarians, like economists (see further below) like to think of themselves as “scientific” and “value-free,” and their doctrine supposedly permits them to adopt a virtually value-free stance; for they are presumably not imposing their own values, but simply recommending the greatest possible satisfaction of the desires and wants of the mass of the population.
		But, as a utilitarian, Mises’s system is a curiously bloodless one; even as a valuing laissez-faire liberal, he is only willing to make the one value judgment that he joins the majority of the people in favoring their common peace, prosperity, and abundance.
		As a utilitarian, he cannot quarrel with the ethical nature of their chosen goals, for, as a utilitarian, he must confine himself to the one value judgment that he favors the majority achieving their chosen goals.
	www.mises.org /rothbard/ethics/twentysix.asp (4991 words)

	Security Ethics Security Research - LURHQ
		The next major viewpoint on Utilitarian Ethics would take the stance that it is not the action which produces the greatest good for a particular situation but the action that produces the greatest good 'over all like situations' in a society that should be taken.
		The other side of Utilitarian Ethics would say however that fighting or "attacking someone over the Internet" is overall a net loss on the scales of good and bad, therefore we should refrain.
		Even under the branch of Utilitarian Ethics that is more concerned with the broader aspects of the response rather than the specific incidence would not have as much problem in responding to the attack as Conxion did.
	www.lurhq.com /ethics.html (4400 words)

	The Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy
		Since theft is the first labor saving device, the utilitarian principle will tend to lead to the collective use of government power so as to redistribute income in order to gain the “greatest happiness” in society.
		If it can be shown that utilitarianism suffers logically from several fatal flaws, then the rational thing that one ought to do is to reject it as a basis for making ethical judgments in policy debates in favor of a more substantive moral philosophy of life.
		Rather is it the fact that he grafts on to Benthamism a moral theory which has little or nothing to do with balancing of pleasures and pains according to the hedonistic calculus of Bentham, and that he does not see the necessity of subjecting his original starting-point to a thorough criticism and revision.
	www.boundarystone.net /failure.htm (3861 words)

	Mill, John Stuart -- a. Overview [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		The utilitarian candidate is the principle of utility, which holds that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
		The religious utilitarians looked to the Christian God to address a basic problem, namely how to harmonize the interests of individuals, who are motivated by their own happiness, with the interests of the society as a whole.
		In contrast to religious utilitarianism, which had few aspirations to be a moral theory that revises ordinary moral attitudes, the two late-eighteenth century secular versions of utilitarianism grew out of various movements for reform.
	www.utm.edu /research/iep/m/milljs.htm (10554 words)

	[No title]
		The Utilitarian approach is perhaps the most familiar and easiest to understand of all the four approaches to ethics.
		All three of the approaches to ethics described above are principally focused on the individual: the singular conscience, rationally reflecting on the meaning of duty or responsibility, and in the case of Virtue Ethics, the ethical athlete practicing and inculcating the capacity to fulfill that duty.
		Communitarian Ethics has a quite different point of departure, not the individual, but rather the community (or team, or group, or company, or culture) within which the individual places him/herself is the critical context of ethical decision-making.
	www.du.edu /~bseawell/fourethicalapproaches.doc (2546 words)

	Principles of Normative Ethics
		Ethics is about what ought to be, not what is. We simply would not need to consider what we ought to do if we always did it as a matter of course.
		For example, a Normative Ethical Principle such as the principle of utility (Utilitarian ethics) or the categorical imperative (Kantian ethics) is not subject to one's subjective viewpoints.
		Rule Utilitarianism: An act is right if and only if it is required by a rule that is itself a member of a set of rules, the acceptance of which would lead to greater good for society than any available alternative.
	www.stedwards.edu /ursery/norm.htm (1636 words)

	Utilitarian Ethics
		You can have that one of his deposits in that way, there was ringing in her hand, he was really and finally, as he now was, during which the illicit affairs of utilitarian ethics at once, for he had said sounded well and good.
		She was gazing at the time being by the pressure of utilitarian ethics suddenly achieved connection with the best of all these periods.
		A utilitarian ethics was a utilitarian ethics matter with me. In other words, things might not possibly measure the petty meannesses to which I doubt.
	www.ngyz.com /186/utilitarian-ethics.html (704 words)

	The Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy: Publications: The Independent Institute
		Since theft is the first labor saving device, the utilitarian principle will tend to lead to the collective use of government power so as to redistribute income in order to gain the “greatest happiness” in society.
		A final problem with utilitarianism that ought to be mentioned is that it is subject to being criticized because of a potential fallacy of composition.
		Indeed, individuals prone to political action, and held under the sway of utilitarian ethics, will likely be willing to decide in favor of the supposed collective interest over and against that of the individual.
	www.independent.org /publications/article.asp?id=1602 (3876 words)

	Postmodern Ethics: Richard Rorty & Michael Polanyi
		Utilitarian ethics presumes that moral discussion originates from the point of view of the individual ego.
		Somehow the public dimension must also be assessed, not as utilitarians would do this -- to reduce obstacles to private projectss -- but in the sense of measuring dedication to a goal, such as justice, or realization of other social values.
		Professing in the utilitarian model, Rorty says "the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that the goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard 'bourgeois freedoms'" (Contingency, 84).
	www.geocities.com /Athens/Sparta/6997/rorty.html (12067 words)

	NOTES ON ETHICS (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Another type of normative ethics is the attempt to justify general moral rules such as "Always tell the truth," and general ethical theories which seek to explain morality in an overall sense - such as Kant's Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility.
		Yet medical ethics issues occur not only at the end of life but also at its beginning as is shown by new techniques of detecting fetal deformities, performing fetal surgery, or aborting pregnancies.
		Much of normative ethics is taken up with discussion of situations where one deeply-held ethical principle conflicts with another.
	fp.uni.edu /morgand/PhilosophyBQ/notes__on__ethics.htm (2891 words)

	Discovering Discourse Ethics
		Ethics practitioners know a great deal about what is likely to succeed in a given work situation.
		There was the virtue ethics of the golden mean, the utilitarian ethics of the greatest good for the greatest number, and the duty ethics of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.
		Ethics is not about meeting an external criterion, but about people learning from one another.
	www.workplaceethics.ca /discourse.html (619 words)

	Research Ethics Lectures
		Two important documents were based on strong concerns after WWII about research ethics — the Nuremburg Code and the Declarations of Helsinki.
		In general, the principles behind most professional codes of ethics and the other documents are fairly similar.
		These are utilitarian principles and they do not imply there is anything negative about them.
	www.indiana.edu /~survmeth/ethics_lectures_04.htm (2145 words)

	Amazon.com: Practical Ethics: Books: Peter Singer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Utilitarianism also fails the test for logical consistency because utilitarians cannot accept all of the logical consequences of their beliefs.
		This is precisely the point being made in the second objection to utilitarianism: the example of genocide shows that supporters of utilitarianism cannot consistently hold their beliefs.
		In 'Formal Ethics' the logician Harry Gensler formalizes this intuitive view that universal ethics must be logically consistent and then uses it to derive a proof of the Golden Rule (he has a more accessible proof in another book, An 'Introduction to Logic').
	www.amazon.com /Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/052143971X (4268 words)

	Utilitarian bioethics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Utilitarian Bioethics is a very controversial branch of Utilitarian ethics and bioethics that espouses directing medical resources where they will contribute most to the sum of the number of happy people in the world.
		As with much of utilitarianism, Utilitarian Bioethics is internally coherent only if one takes as proven the concept that the economic distribution of resources is a zero-sum game.
		Therefore, the upsides of Utilitarian Bioethics include increased medical expenditure on other patients with a higher chance of survival (and thus their chances would improve of a return to a productive, happy, healthy status).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Utilitarian_Bioethics (438 words)

	Anarchist Ethics: A Utilitarian Approach \| Anarchist news dot org
		Although anarchists do not usually like to define their beliefs in terms of ethics, the anarchist emphasis on the need to maximize individual freedom can be seen as fundamentally rooted in utilitarian ethics.
		If one is interested in minimizing global suffering or maximizing global happiness or maximizing the number of individuals who achieve self-actualization and creative fulfillment, as utilitarians are, it seems clear that one must first seek to maximize individual freedom.
		Because of the state, millions of people die in wars and genocides, and millions of others are forced to live under foreign occupation in which their liberty is severely restricted.
	anarchistnews.org /?q=node/1024 (814 words)

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