Utilitarianism: Unequal If Uber

Another system of ethics to look at is Utilitarianism, which says that the goal of every decision is to create the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. Decisions are made with the consideration of every person it will affect, and whether the outcome of the decision will make most of the affected people happy. Utilitarianism is consequentialist, meaning it focuses on the results of a decision to know whether it is right or wrong.
Uber has a responsibility to its customers, to its drivers, and to its shareholders; and any choice it makes affects those three groups directly. Uber’s choice was to continue paying surge price wages to the drivers to ensure they were going to continue driving but cut the cost for the customers during the hurricane. This decision is very utilitarian because it keeps the drivers and the customers happy with high wages and low prices, but Uber shareholders probably lost money because of the decision. One can assume there were many more people driving and needing a ride during the hurricane than there were shareholders, so the decision seems to have kept the most people happy.
The next system of ethics is Kantian Ethics, which proposes that people have duties that they may not …show more content…
Cutting the prices during the hurricane is a decision that most would agree was a moral decision that should not hurt anyone’s conscience. Keeping the insane prices while people are trying to leave the coast would probably cause a guilty conscience for Uber’s CEO. The media criticisms probably also added to the guilt that caused the CEO to cut prices. Using reasoning that something that causes a guilty conscience is bad, Uber would have cut prices to help the people during the natural disaster, which is exactly what they did. So Uber could have been using a universal code of right and wrong determined by Natural Law