Utilitarian Ethics

Hey there!

I hope everyone is doing well, today I have been speaking with my professor in my advanced ethics class. If you didn't know I was doing college ethics, you do now, ha-ha.

There was a question brought up today, the question is :

" The utilitarian framework is an ethical approach that evaluates the results or consequences of the decision. Not all decisions are necessarily ethical because it results in the desired result. Theft is not necessarily ethical if the end result is jail or a life of crime. Utilitarian ethics says that if the end results of the theft is the betterment of your family, or the betterment of all parties, then the decision to steal could possibly be the best decision given all the facts. Because utilitarian ethics are fact driven, if you change the facts you change the potential "rightness" of the decision. If you steal only to get money to buy things you don't need then this is clearly wrong. When a father is driven to steal to feed for his family or care for their needs then people have more empathy with him and are more inclined to be lenient with him if caught.

Take for instance the movie John Q with Denzel Washington. Denzel's character committed countless felonies, including kidnapping and assault. But because of the facts surrounding his set of circumstances everyone in the movie felt sorry for him. In his mind the ends justified the means. His son received the treatment he needed despite the fact that Denzel took an entire hospital hostage and endangered the life of many people.

This in my view is truly utilitarian. The consequences of his actions resulted in him saving his sons life.

Do you think that most people make decisions on principles of utility or consequence that take all things into consideration (e.g. all the people affected by the decision made; or all the bad things that could occur)? "


and my reply to this question is :

" This actually goes very deep and has many factors to it. I personally know a lot of people that go off of the Utilitarian views in life, however, there is always something that stops them from acting on a fact in a situation like this. The reason for that is because we have deepened feelings of some sort of emotion. Knowing that Utility views are key at times, as humans it can be difficult to bring yourself to a level of logic to surpass all feeling. In this case it would have been Denzel Washington's situation. Knowing that in the movie this was for his one and only son, it would be hard to really see anything else, almost as if you put the blinders on and focused on that one goal, no matter what happens. For people who have their hands in many different gloves must make a decision based on consequence, mainly because of emotion, which is something that humans will truly never be able to remove from their being no matter how much they have convinced themselves that the emotion is gone. This is of course saying the only form of ethics is to better the person on factual consequence outside of the standard system we have today in society. Although it's funny, because emotion is what drives us to Utilitarian ethics, yet people would claim that these acts are unethical and there is always a better way. Which I do agree with, their is always a better way. So really what it comes down to is self awareness and self gratification, even in desperate times. So really when you weigh it out, in the end, Utilitarian ethics is a very selfish form of self pity. Which then drives into a whole different question of, am I truly being selfish when I am trying to help the ones I love? That answer would still be yes, because that is what you want and you are the one acting upon it, by definition of course. Which goes back into stating The betterment of your family and all parties. The only parties though that were bettered were yours, ( saying you are Denzel Washington's movie character in this case ) and you have threatened the lives of many for the one, which is completely backwards from The lives of the many out weigh the lives of the few. This would then show that if you were forced in to taking on hostages to get what was needed, ethically, would this still be a view of Utilitarian ethics? Although you are bettering your family by doing so, you are still putting many in harms way; knowingly and threatening their lives. These people could have families of their own, children who are sick too. It's something that is never known from the start upon an assumed action by the person who is affected by the Utilitarian ethical motive. So I suppose in the end when you really think about it, people are very selfish, and jump to Utilitarian ethics most of the time. With that said, the answer to this is yes, most people do make decisions on principles of utility. However, once you've pulled apart and analyzed every option and realize what you are doing by action is wrong; jumping to this conclusion immediately, you have a whole new outlook on life. Which you then realize, it's not all about me and bettering my family no matter the cost. Bettering a family is good, but bettering them the right way, knowing that there is always another option. "

I am now curious to know how you feel about Utilitarian ethics. Do you feel as though most people today go off of the Principles of Utility? Why or why not?

This is Sean signing out.