Personal Integrity In Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the moral principle that highlights the act that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, meaning it is a consequentialist position - only focusing on the outcome of the action. Unfortunately, the intentions of the individual has no moral merit when deciding whether the action was morally right or wrong, what matters is the outcome of the action and if that action generates happiness. Therefore, this theory has no connection to personal integrity or motives of the individual, it fails to take the individual 's character into consideration. Whether the person intentionally, unintentionally, or accidentally performed an action is not a deciding factor in the utilitarianism theory.
Personal integrity is doing …show more content…
William stresses two highly important examples where an individual 's personal integrity is disregarded in the utilitarian point of view, considering only the product of the action. The first example is picking to do nothing or to do something that produces the greatest happiness. If the person picks to simply do nothing they are to blame for not performing the act that produces happiness in the eyes of a Utilitarian. This is the utilitarianism’s flaw since it basically forces a person to pick one way of acting over the other, even though the other action is what the person’s integrity wants to do. Next, the other example William utilizes is of Jim and the indian situation, where Jim’s integrity is completely ignored. Jim is in a dilemma where he has the option to kill on Indian to save nine others or to not kill and have the ten Indians killed by a dictator. Obviously, through a utilitarian point of view Jim should kill the one Indian since it would produce more happiness than the other option of not killing at all. With that, if Jim did pick not to kill he would be held responsible for the deaths of the Indians. This however, has no consideration whatsoever to Jim’s personal integrity. Here Jim basically has no choice, but to kill, this is where the consideration of his own values and beliefs should accounted for. It could against his personal integrity to kill thus he should not be pressured to do so. Utilitarianism tells Jim what he ought to do since he does not necessarily have a choice, for he would be blamed for the deaths if he had not killed one indian. Again this is flawed because the deaths caused by Jim not killing should be blamed on the other person doing the killing not