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  • Essay / Theories of utilitarianism and ethics and its application within society

    This essay will examine the purpose of individuals when it comes to moral and ethical behavior. John Mills and Immanuel Kant, two renowned philosophers, respectively theorists of utilitarianism and deontology, are considered great enlighteners on morality and ethics. This article will outline the basis of these two opposing philosophies by describing the relative perspectives of each, and will show which theory is likely to be applied in practice within society, and it will also show how they apply in hypothetical arguments such as Rescue I and Rescue. II.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Mill's beliefs towards the ideals of morality and ethics are built on the aspect of utilitarianism; whose opinions are based on moral interactions that are for the benefit of society. Mill believed that consequences are the relative net result of actions performed. His theory draws on theories such as hedonism and universal consequentialism. Mill's theory essentially shows that the morality of a choice is more or less quantified, by taking the negative implications and subtracting them from the positive values ​​of the decision to get the overall net worth. Utilitarianism is also defined by “the end “justifying” the means.” (Brink)Kant's theory of deontology is based on a person's ethical decisions related to their moral obligation and conscience. This theory is intriguing and interesting because human motivation is not always intact. The reason many people perform moral acts is because reciprocity is possible; Kant believes, however, that true motivation is simply “doing the right thing.” This means that choices are focused on what is right, regardless of the personal effects of the outcome. In short, motivation should be focused on the good, independent of intrinsic motivation. (“Kantian Ethics,” n.d.) To describe the first scenario, Rescue I, rescuers choose to save a group of five people in danger and unintentionally kill another person also in imminent danger elsewhere. From Mill's point of view, a utilitarian point of view, Mill would justify this reasoning with the quantified notion that the sum of positives is greater than the net of negatives with four lives saved; the opposite choice would have caused five deaths, which underlines the notion of additional benefit for the greatest number of people. Mills would say that saving the group of five individuals versus just one would be the better choice because the happiness of the sum of the five surviving families would be greater than that of just one. From Kant's deontological perspective, the justification would be Rescue I's reasoning that the rescuer's motivation was to save lives without any prior motivation to do so. Aside from the fact that they were informed of the dangerous situation of the group of five before that of the group of five, this would apparently negate any ulterior motive, and as long as the goal was to save lives, their actions would be morally right even if a person would die. The Rescue II scenario essentially describes the rescuers having to save the group of five people in imminent danger, but they would have to run over one individual on the road to save the other five. Similar to Rescue I, Mills' view would still say that the benefits of saving five people would outweigh the harms of losing one individual; and just like Rescue I, the total happiness of the five families would exceed the sum total of a single individual. However, from a point of ».