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However, with intention the situation is more complex. In a footnote printed in the second edition of Utilitarianism, Mill says: "the morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention—that is, upon what the agent wills to do." [137] Elsewhere, he says, "Intention, and motive, are two very different things. But it is the intention ...
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 ...
Thus, when an agent performs an action from duty it is because their moral incentives are chosen over and above any opposing inclinations. Kant wished to move beyond the conception of morality as externally imposed duties, and present an ethics of autonomy, when rational agents freely recognize the claims reason makes upon them. [8]
Rule utilitarianism states that the morally right action is the one that is in accordance with a moral rule whose general observance would create the most happiness. Act utilitarianism evaluates an act by its actual consequences whereas rule utilitarianism evaluates an action by the consequences of its general or universal practice (by all ...
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]
Mill took many elements of his version of utilitarianism from Jeremy Bentham, the great nineteenth-century legal reformer and the propound of utilitarianism, who along with William Paley were the two most influential English utilitarians prior to Mill. Like Bentham, Mill believed that happiness (or pleasure, which both Bentham and Mill equated ...
The most prominent among them is classical utilitarianism, which states that the moral value of acts only depends on the pleasure and suffering they cause. [32] An alternative approach says that there are many different sources of value, which all contribute to one overall value. [31]
Utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer have argued that the key to inclusion in the moral community is not rationality — for if it were, we might have to exclude some disabled people and infants, and might also have to distinguish between the degrees of rationality of healthy adults — but the real object of moral action is ...