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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.
In contrast, act utilitarians judge an act in terms of the consequences of that act alone (such as stopping at a red light), rather than judging whether it faithfully adhered to the rule of which it was an instance (such as, "always stop at red lights"). Rule utilitarians argue that following rules that tend to lead to the greatest good will ...
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.
Act utilitarianism maintains that an action is right if it maximizes utility; rule utilitarianism maintains that an action is right if it conforms to a rule that maximizes utility. In 1956, Urmson (1953) published an influential article arguing that Mill justified rules on utilitarian principles. [53]
Negative hedonistic utilitarianism thinks of utility in terms of hedonic mental states such as suffering and unpleasantness. [6] Negative Average Preference Utilitarianism [ 17 ] makes the same assumptions on what is good as negative preference utilitarianism, but states that the average number (per individual) of preferences frustrated should ...
The utility functions may represent their chance of recovery – () is the probability of agent to recover by getting doses of the medication. The utilitarian rule then allocates the medication in a way that maximizes the expected number of survivors.
"3. What is Good? Hedonistic vs. Pluralistic Consequentialisms". Consequentialism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Crisp, Roger (2021). "Well-Being". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Theories of Well-Being, in William MacAskill & Richard Yetter-Chappell (2021), Introduction to Utilitarianism
Such utility functions are also called von Neumann–Morgenstern (vNM). This is a central theme of the expected utility hypothesis in which an individual chooses not the highest expected value but rather the highest expected utility. The expected utility-maximizing individual makes decisions rationally based on the theory's axioms.