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This says that the money creates utility for the most people by funding government services. [150] Many utilitarian philosophers, including Peter Singer and Toby Ord, argue that inhabitants of developed countries in particular have an obligation to help to end extreme poverty across the world, for example by regularly donating some of their ...
In other words, if an ethical solution is more costly, a utilitarian will argue from a standpoint of efficiency or effectiveness to justify a less ethical solution. Deontologists: Believe that certain absolute principles should be obeyed, regardless of the consequences. An example of an absolute principle would be honesty.
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.
Historical examples [ edit ] The harm principle is found in article 5 of the first English-language constitution from 1647: "An Agreement of the People for a firme and present Peace, upon grounds of common right and freedome...." , presented to the Army Council, E. 412, 21.
This is an incomplete list of advocates of utilitarianism and/or consequentialism This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources .
For example, rule utilitarianism was criticized for implying that in some cases an individual should pursue a course of action that would obviously not maximise utility. Conversely, act utilitarianism was criticized for not allowing for a 'human element' in its calculations, i.e. it is sometimes too difficult (or impossible) for an ordinary person.
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]
For example, the standard social scoring function for first-preference plurality is the total number of voters who rank a candidate first. Every social ordering can be made into a choice function by considering only the highest-ranked outcome. Less obviously, though, every social choice function is also an ordering function.