# Utilitarianism



## Cheshire Cat (Feb 21, 2007)

This thread will be made up of some quick and dirty problems I think plague Utilitarianism. I may be wrong on any of these, and if so, I wish to be corrected. Unhappily (pun intended ) I don't have time to go in-depth into these problems, but hopefully they can be of some help.

-Is/Ought Fallacy. People seek pleasure/happiness, but *ought* people seek pleasure/happiness? 

-Treats people as ‘means’ instead of ‘ends’. 

-Can be impractical when a quick moral decision needs to be made.

-Interesting situations with masochists and sadists.

-How can one remain impartial if one does not have the same level of knowledge concerning everyone whom a given moral choice will affect? 

-Has the potential to stifle minority opinion. 

-“Good” motivations are not intrinsically good, but only because it would produce a better overall happiness to praise “good” motivations than it would to praise “bad” ones. 

It may be the case that if people act as if deontology is true, then the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people will be produced. If this is the case, then Utilitarian’s *ought* not teach their theory to others. A viewpoint which claims that itself should not be taught is obviously flawed. 

Hard cases for act utilitarianism: Thought Experiment… In society X, there happens to be a serial rapist on the loose who is causing the society terrible unhappiness. The police decide that in order to increase happiness, they will arrest and jail an innocent man that nobody cares much for, and accuse him of being the rapist. Well, this is what they end up doing. It just so happens that the rapist stops, seeing as he might be off the hook. This decision brings the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people, but it is intuitively morally wrong. 

-It may be the case that Rule Utilitarianism can be shown to break down into act utilitarianism. 

-It can be extremely hard to calculate consequences that will affect future sentient beings. 

-In certain moral decisions (such as decisions that affect the future in large ways), omniscience may be required to correctly make a moral decision.


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## No Longer A Libertine (Feb 21, 2007)

It is bedfellows with pragmatism, one naturally begets the other in a thinking process that is consistent.


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## Cheshire Cat (Feb 21, 2007)

Yes, well my ethics professor is a pragmatist and I think he is partly utilitarian, but more into evolutionary ethics. We haven't studied it yet, so I'm not exactly sure what that entails (beyond the obvious).


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## No Longer A Libertine (Feb 21, 2007)

caleb_woodrow said:


> Yes, well my ethics professor is a pragmatist and I think he is partly utilitarian, but more into evolutionistic ethics. We haven't studied it yet, so I'm not exactly sure what that entails.


What you'll find is it all is the same just repackaged and tinkered with in terminology.

Post Modernism is truly little different than the Modernism it supposedly improves upon or defies. Relativism is the absolute it adheres to which immediately destroys the paradigm.

The Dadas were just like the Bohemians except with a utilitarian strain as opposed to just hedonistic.

Some think that we are now in the post-post moderen age, but no one can tell for sure because if so we aren't distant enough from post modernism to gauge that fact.

Truly it is all a bunch of lingo that boils down to self autonomy, self gratification, self, self ,self.


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## Cheshire Cat (Feb 21, 2007)

Thanks for the response 'No Longer a Libertine'. Anybody have any other thoughts or suggestions? Is it inconsistent to be a compabilist while at the same time criticizing Utilitarianism for treating people as 'means' instead of ends?


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