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Two-level utilitarianism is virtually a synthesis of the opposing doctrines of act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism states that in all cases the morally right action is the one which produces the most well-being, whereas rule utilitarianism states that the morally right action is the one that is in accordance with a ...
Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, egalitarian utilitarianism considers either the interests of all humanity or all sentient beings equally.
The Elements of Moral Philosophy is a 1986 ethics textbook by the philosophers James Rachels and Stuart Rachels. [1] It explains a number of moral theories and topics, including cultural relativism, subjectivism, divine command theory, ethical egoism, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and deontology. The book uses real ...
Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that they should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the total amount of happiness.
Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics that states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Classical utilitarians, including Jeremy Bentham , John Stuart Mill , and Henry Sidgwick , define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain.
Rule utilitarianism is a form of utilitarianism that says an action is right as it conforms to a rule that leads to the greatest good, or that "the rightness or wrongness of a particular action is a function of the correctness of the rule of which it is an instance". [1]
In ethics, Norcross defends a version of act utilitarianism known as scalar utilitarianism, which is the theory that there are no right or wrong actions, only better or worse actions ranked along a continuum from the action (or actions) that contributes most to overall utility to the action (or actions) that contributes the least.
The felicific calculus is an algorithm formulated by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to induce. Bentham, an ethical hedonist , believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it ...