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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 .
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. [1] [2] In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number.
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 2005, protesters at over 40 universities demanded that their institutions endorse companies that use "sweat-free" labor. Many anti-sweatshop groups were student-led, such as the United Students Against Sweatshops. At Brown University, Nike went so far as to pull out from a contract with the women’s ice hockey team because of efforts by a ...
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.
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.
For example: [1]: 44 Consider a problem of allocating wood among builders. The utility functions may represent their productive power – () is the number of buildings that agent can build using units of wood. The utilitarian rule then allocates the wood in a way that maximizes the number of buildings.
For example, Rawls' maximin considers a group's utility to be the same as the utility of the member who is worst off. The "happy" utility monster of total utilitarianism is ineffective against maximin, because as soon as a monster has received enough utility to no longer be the worst-off in the group, there's no need to accommodate it.