Utilitarianism By Jeremy Bentham

Utilitarianism, introduced by Jeremy Bentham, is to act in such a way that maximizes happiness for everyone. The goal is that it is natural, simple and it considers everyone. However, it does not consider everyone as it says it does. It is not about equality for all and a utilitarian will do whatever the option is, good or bad, to maximize happiness without considering an innocent individual. Utilitarianism considers what group of people holds a greater number of individuals, rather than a group of people with less individuals. The reason for this is because the group with more people will have an accumulative amount of more happiness rather than the smaller group of people. However, it doesn’t consider the rightness or wrongness of an action. …show more content…
For example, what if you were a doctor and you had to save four patients from dying during the process of their surgery. Nobody in the entire world has the same organs as those patients do. You can’t get them from absolutely anywhere except by just one person, and that person is your daughter. Your daughter has just graduated from a four year college and is about to get one of the top jobs in the country where she will be making a large amount of money. Your job as a doctor is to save those patients, so what do you do? Will you kill your daughter to give her organs to the patients for them to survive? This is not justified in any sense to kill, whatever the situation might be just for the simple fact that killing an innocent person is right because it will make others happier. Others, as in the four patients who survived and accumulated is more happiness, than just your daughters alone. Most people know that after taking an action it has consequences, but there are points we need to measure to make sure it's worth it. An objection presented to John Stuart Mill states that it is so far removed for morality and that utilitarianism is basically giving authority for it to be justified to disobey principles that should be upheld. Mill responds to Bentham by explaining that he forgot to distinguish two types of pleasure, qualitative and quantitative pleasure. This is basically the difference between a higher pleasure …show more content…
It is agreeable that in certain situations and a utilitarian would also agree, that sacrifice should be implemented at all times. In this case it would be for the doctor to kill his own daughter. Even if he doesn't want to actually commit the crime and in that moment says he couldn’t do that to his own daughter, he should still sacrifice only one life for the lives of many because that would be the right thing to do in a utilitarianism way. Anyways, it’s only one person that would have to be killed so that the 1 million lives are saved and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to society if they are alive or not. That 1 million people would impact way more than just one person so therefore it is okay to kill just one person to save the million lives. It would be far more noticeable that one million people are gone other than just one. People pass away every day, so just one person does not make much difference. Also, wouldn’t there be so much more happiness if the 1 million lives are saved than just the individual alone? And wouldn’t there be a huge amount of sadness if the 1 million passed away and didn’t make it, than just the single person who would be only the ones they knew grieving over her? A utilitarianist may also say that in certain situations the quality of a settlement disallows the