Brandon Balsirow
Word Count:
Title Here
Attack or defend the principle of utility. Does it define right and wrong, good and evil? The principle of utility is insufficient to define right and wrong, or good and evil. Bentham asserts that humans are controlled by two feelings; pain and pleasure, and that they determine what we ought to do. Using this assumption about pain and pleasure, he comes up with the principle of utility. Actions are right as far as they promote happiness or wrong as far as they tend to produce pain. Although it seems that everything in life can be ultimately attributed to either pleasure and pain, this not a sufficient method of determining morality as each person has their own unique sense of pain and pleasure and the …show more content…
One must calculate the net result from each action to see if the pleasure outweighs the pain in order to be doing the right thing. Although Bentham focuses on the quantitative aspect of pleasure, he fails to acknowledge that what is pleasurable to a certain individual may or may not be interpreted as the same by a different individual. For an easy example to highlight the difference, let’s say that I love to eat broccoli whilst my brother absolutely detests the sight and taste of them. What gives me pleasure, gives none to my brother. Likewise, on a societal level, different cultures would also have different perceptions of what is pleasurable/good and what is painful/evil. One culture could believe that dogs and cats should be kept as household pets while in a second culture, totally rely on dogs and cats as a primary meat source. If pain and pleasure are dependent on someone’s perception, then how could we tell which culture is right when it comes to something such as eating dogs. The culture that taboos the consumption of dog meat would experience pain to see dogs being slaughtered while the other culture would get pleasure from eating the dogs. The principle of utility works in each respective culture, but does not give an over encompassing true sense of right and …show more content…
Bentham explains a lot about how to measure pain and pleasure giving four criteria to consider when determining the value of pleasure or pain for an individual and seven criteria when there a number of persons involved in an action, “1. It’s intensity. 2. It’s duration 3. It’s certainty or uncertainty. 4. It’s propinquity or remoteness 5. It’s fecundity. 6. It’s purity 7. It’s extent (37). These seven do not consider the fact that pain and pleasure are susceptible to someone’s opinion. The intensity can be open to biases because either they can believe that the pain would be much worse than it actually is or the opposite. Also, the extent of how many people are affected by an action can be unknown until after the action has taken place. There may be times where the gravity of the situation is not fully realized and there could be more people affected than anticipated. A counter argument could be just to use rough estimates when determining these values, which would be a great point, but estimations are only that, estimation and are also susceptible to be completely
Word Count:
Title Here
Attack or defend the principle of utility. Does it define right and wrong, good and evil? The principle of utility is insufficient to define right and wrong, or good and evil. Bentham asserts that humans are controlled by two feelings; pain and pleasure, and that they determine what we ought to do. Using this assumption about pain and pleasure, he comes up with the principle of utility. Actions are right as far as they promote happiness or wrong as far as they tend to produce pain. Although it seems that everything in life can be ultimately attributed to either pleasure and pain, this not a sufficient method of determining morality as each person has their own unique sense of pain and pleasure and the …show more content…
One must calculate the net result from each action to see if the pleasure outweighs the pain in order to be doing the right thing. Although Bentham focuses on the quantitative aspect of pleasure, he fails to acknowledge that what is pleasurable to a certain individual may or may not be interpreted as the same by a different individual. For an easy example to highlight the difference, let’s say that I love to eat broccoli whilst my brother absolutely detests the sight and taste of them. What gives me pleasure, gives none to my brother. Likewise, on a societal level, different cultures would also have different perceptions of what is pleasurable/good and what is painful/evil. One culture could believe that dogs and cats should be kept as household pets while in a second culture, totally rely on dogs and cats as a primary meat source. If pain and pleasure are dependent on someone’s perception, then how could we tell which culture is right when it comes to something such as eating dogs. The culture that taboos the consumption of dog meat would experience pain to see dogs being slaughtered while the other culture would get pleasure from eating the dogs. The principle of utility works in each respective culture, but does not give an over encompassing true sense of right and …show more content…
Bentham explains a lot about how to measure pain and pleasure giving four criteria to consider when determining the value of pleasure or pain for an individual and seven criteria when there a number of persons involved in an action, “1. It’s intensity. 2. It’s duration 3. It’s certainty or uncertainty. 4. It’s propinquity or remoteness 5. It’s fecundity. 6. It’s purity 7. It’s extent (37). These seven do not consider the fact that pain and pleasure are susceptible to someone’s opinion. The intensity can be open to biases because either they can believe that the pain would be much worse than it actually is or the opposite. Also, the extent of how many people are affected by an action can be unknown until after the action has taken place. There may be times where the gravity of the situation is not fully realized and there could be more people affected than anticipated. A counter argument could be just to use rough estimates when determining these values, which would be a great point, but estimations are only that, estimation and are also susceptible to be completely