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What are the merits and draw backs of utilitarianism as a guide to moral conduct?
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- Words:
- 1534
- Submitted:
- Thu Jul 11 2002
... What are the merits and draw backs of utilitarianism as a guide to moral conduct? What is utilitarianism? "The greatest good of the greatest number". Simple. Or is it? In any real situation, there are many people involved; they will all be affected in different ways; there is no reason why the "greatest number" should receive the "greatest good". What is usually meant in practice by that slogan is something like the following procedure for choosing between two or more actions. 1. Look at the state of life after each action. Look in particular at the level of happiness of each person in the various situations. 2. Add up, somehow, those levels of happiness in each case. 3. Compare the results. The one, which leads to the maximum total happiness, is the (morally) right one. The thing to notice about this is that it actually involves a lot of quite separate
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