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Utilitarian John Mill's Greatest Happiness Calculus

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Utilitarian John Mill Stuart applied a scientific model to morality with the goal of creating the maximum amount of goodness called the Greatest Happiness Principle. The Great Happiness Principle is the morally right action that causes the greatest overall amount of pleasure, happiness, or the least amount of suffering. This can be applied in general by using the Happiness Calculus. The Happiness Calculus measures how much pleasure and pain will be brought out of a given situation. An example for the Happiness Calculus would be going to the zoo on a rainy day. The pleasure would be seeing all of the exotic animals, while the pain would be doing it in the with the possibility of not seeing any of the animals due to the rain. In that scenario, …show more content…
The Principle of Humanity always treats human beings as Ends in Themselves (valuable for their own sake) and never as a Mere Mean (valuable only as a means to an end). The Greatest Happiness Principle states the morally right action is the one that causes the greatest overall amount of goodness (pleasure or happiness). I personally find Mill’s Greatest Happiness Principle as a better guidance for several reasons based on the previous dilemma and as an overall moral view. The Greatest Happiness Principle believes that if you are given a situation that has the possibility of creating pleasure to others (even if it doesn’t affect you), then you should take action and deliver the situation. I believe that making sure people are happy, even if that means you are unhappy, is vital to a happier society. For the dilemma previously given, the better guidance was the Greatest Happiness Principle because although it hurt Ryan since Alonna does not feel the same as he does, he will feel more pleasure in the future because he will not be hurt over an unexpected heartbreak as if I did not tell him and let him discover this heartbreak in the future on his

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