Utilitarianism is a moral and political theory which was first developed by the philosophers Bentham and Mill in the 18th and 19th centuries and who says in its simplest form that the aim of morals is to maximize the happiness of For example: We are at the end of spring and your garden would need to be mowed, Jeremy the son of your neighbor proposes to do it in exchange for 200 dollars, You accept and the agreed day, Jeremy comes back with his mower and spend the afternoon conscientiously transforming your garden into a Stamford Bridge lawn, the result is impeccable and you take the ticket out of your wallet. Except that when you give him the ticket, you remember that you are a utilitarian, you remember that your goal in life is to maximize the happiness of as many people as possible. That with the 200 dollars you had to give, you could buy 25 little mosquito repellents from children exposed to malaria and save children suffering from malaria, it’s could produce much more happiness than paying Jeremy who already has a good health, a good life and spend his days playing at fortnite.
With utilitarianism, morality begins to no longer depend on God, to depend only on a calculation of consequences on happiness. And as it is easy to admit that the pursuit of happiness is something universal, one begins with utilitarianism to develop a universal morality which can apply to all, regardless of particular beliefs in a particular god. moral judgment. Utilitarianism is a theory of egalitarianism where the happiness of each has the same value. The happiness of the Congolese is not worth more than the happiness of the Chinese and therefore when we do the calculation of maximization of happiness we give the same consideration to interests of each. And this is something very important for humanity (society). the utilitarianism of maximizing the happiness of the greatest number. that is to say, to know how to behave. Utilitarianism tells us that you must make a calculation of the consequences that your actions will have and choose the solution that will produce the most happiness or the least unhappiness possible, For example: to know if it is acceptable to kill a person to save 50, you calculate what misfortune results from the death of a person and what misfortune results from the death of 50 people and as a priori the death of 50 people will cause more misfortune than death You will conclude that it is moral to sacrifice one person to save 50 people.
Utilitarianism is a theory which has been very popular historically and which still retains the favor of almost a quarter of Utilitarianism allows:
– That moral judgments should not be arbitrary but justified
-That happiness is appreciable and worth the effort to be maximized
-That all human beings deserve the same consideration. Contemporary philosophers.
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The strongest critics of utilitarianism focus on two types of joint situations which include what are called specific obligations and illegitimate preferences.
T
he case of specific obligations c is the case that we presented to you at the introduction, the case of the little boy who comes to mow your lawn there are lots of situations in life where we made promises to others and or considered normal that these promises must be kept. If we promise to others and or it is considered normal that these promises must be kept, If we promise my neighbor to pay him in exchange for his work, we will acquire what we could call a specific obligation towards him , which is the obligation to actually pay it once the work is done, no matter how happy we can bring others with this money. In everyday life when we decide to pay our neighbor, we are looking in a way towards the past we had done to our neighbor and towards the work he has just done. The past plays a very important role in our intuitive moral judgments, but utilitarianism does not look to the past, it looks to the future, to the consequences. This is why a utilitarianism may not want to pay someone who works for it and it is for its that utilitarianism is very counterintuitive in situations where one has obligations towards certain people. For example: For a loan of money of a pure and hard utility would say that one must reimburse the money that one has lent only if this reimbursement maximizes happiness which is completely different from the intuition, that one that one must always repay his loans, no matter if his maximizes happiness or name.
Basic utilitarianism requires that your personal projects and all the things that matter to you count no more than your neighbor’s projects. Even if you have worked for years for a cause that you thought was just and important, one day that you can produce more happiness working on the projects of your neighbor, you must be ready to stop overnight any action in favor of this project which was important to you.
Illegitimate preferences, imagine that tomorrow your neighbors come knocking on your door to tell you that they would like to transform your garden into a public garden. Certainly they tell you it will be nerd for you, but compare to the joy that they and all the children in the neighborhood it would be well worth it. The action that maximizes the happiness of the greatest number is that which takes your garden to transform it into a public garden. This is what is called an illegitimate preference: it is the preference of someone in this case from one of your neighbors, who in current morality is generally not taken into account to determine what it is moral to do but who in a utilitarian calculation is perfectly admissible. Utilitarianism is an egalitarian philosophy which gives equal consideration to everyone’s interests. people will not agree to market a vaccine that would increase the mortality of a population even if it would reduce the mortality of a larger population.
To know who to give your money to an association, on the other hand you probably have no idea of whether it is better to give your money to an association for the fight against malaria or an association to fight against HIV. these cases seem perfect for starting in utilitarianism and keep the cases which involve taking happiness from some to give it to others.
