Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Lexical threshold" negative utilitarianism says that there is some disutility, for instance some extreme suffering, such that no positive utility can counterbalance it. [24] 'Consent-based' negative utilitarianism is a specification of lexical threshold negative utilitarianism, which specifies where the threshold should be located.
The happiness pump is a person who has taken utilitarianism too far and will give themselves great pain so long as they believe it makes other people somewhere in the world much happier. [ 1 ] Philosopher Joshua David Greene says it is almost impossible for a happiness pump to exist in real life because anyone who tried would give up very shortly.
Punishment might make "bad people" into "better" ones. For the utilitarian, all that "bad person" can mean is "person who's likely to cause unwanted things (like suffering)". So, utilitarianism could recommend punishment that changes someone such that they are less likely to cause bad things. Successful rehabilitation would reduce recidivism. [155]
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.
The demandingness objection is a common [1] [2] argument raised against utilitarianism and other consequentialist ethical theories. The consequentialist requirement that we maximize the good impartially seems to this objection to require us to perform acts that we would normally consider optional.
By the 1990s the phrase cropped up repeatedly in English-language publications across the globe. Today, as before, the concept of empowerment is malleable enough to take the shapes its advocates ...
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 ...
In social choice and operations research, the utilitarian rule (also called the max-sum rule) is a rule saying that, among all possible alternatives, society should pick the alternative which maximizes the sum of the utilities of all individuals in society.