Mills Utilitarianism

3 Pages 767 Words

When faced with a moral dilemma, utilitarianism identifies the
appropriate considerations, but offers no realistic way to gather the
necessary information to make the required calculations. This lack of
information is a problem both in evaluating the welfare issues and in
evaluating the consequentialist issues which utilitarianism requires
be weighed when making moral decisions. Utilitarianism attempts to
solve both of these difficulties by appealing to experience; however,
no method of reconciling an individual decision with the rules of
experience is suggested, and no relative weights are assigned to the
various considerations. In deciding whether or not to torture a
terrorist who has planted a bomb in New York City, a utilitarian must
evaluate both the overall welfare of the people involved or effected
by the action taken, and the consequences of the action taken. To
calculate the welfare of the people involved in or effected by an
action, utilitarianism requires that all individuals be considered
equally. Quantitative utilitarians would weigh the pleasure and pain
which would be caused by the bomb exploding against the pleasure
and pain that would be caused by torturing the terrorist. Then, the
amounts would be summed and compared. The problem with this method is
that it is impossible to know beforehand how much pain would be caused
by the bomb exploding or how much pain would be caused by the torture.
Utilitarianism offers no practical way to make the interpersonal
comparison of utility necessary to compare the pains. In the case of
the bomb exploding, it at least seems highly probable that a greater
amount of pain would be caused, at least in the present, by the bomb
exploding. This probability suffices for a quantitative utilitarian,
but it does not account for the consequences, which create an entirely
different problem, which will be discussed below. The probability also
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