Nestle's echical issue
Week 3 Assignment:1
1. In what ways is the need to calculate utility a problem for utilitarianism?
In my opinion the meaning of calculation of utility not so curtain and understandable. We know that some actions produce more pleasure for us than others but it is not difficult for us to rank actions in order of the pleasure they give us. Same time it is impossible to accurately measure how much pleasure they give us. What is the measurement of this action and how we can measure it? It has been argued that it is impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because consequences are inherently unknowable.
I think that not only is it impossible to assign a precise utility value to the incident, it is impossible to know whether, ultimately, the near-meltdown that occurred was a good or bad thing. From the beginning, utilitarianism has recognized that certainty in such matters is unobtainable Let’s take example which I found in Wikipedia, about a man, his friend and his son who go out on a mountain hike and get stranded in a cave in bad weather. The boy will certainly not survive, not being as hardy as the men, and the men will only survive if they kill and eat the boy before he is frozen. The utilitarian thing to do is to eat the kid. Most people's commonsense moral intuition would disagree, indicating that there are values that can (sometimes at least) supersede simple utility. It should be the utilitarian's task to defend the eating of the child in order to prove that utility is the supreme value. Arguing that the other value is just utility in disguise allows one to assume that utility is prime without proving so.
I understood that t everything can reduce to utility is simply not borne out in common moral experience, and should not just be taken as an assumption. As a human we always learn from our experience, as well as the morality of our life and acknowledgment of first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary
1. In what ways is the need to calculate utility a problem for utilitarianism?
In my opinion the meaning of calculation of utility not so curtain and understandable. We know that some actions produce more pleasure for us than others but it is not difficult for us to rank actions in order of the pleasure they give us. Same time it is impossible to accurately measure how much pleasure they give us. What is the measurement of this action and how we can measure it? It has been argued that it is impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because consequences are inherently unknowable.
I think that not only is it impossible to assign a precise utility value to the incident, it is impossible to know whether, ultimately, the near-meltdown that occurred was a good or bad thing. From the beginning, utilitarianism has recognized that certainty in such matters is unobtainable Let’s take example which I found in Wikipedia, about a man, his friend and his son who go out on a mountain hike and get stranded in a cave in bad weather. The boy will certainly not survive, not being as hardy as the men, and the men will only survive if they kill and eat the boy before he is frozen. The utilitarian thing to do is to eat the kid. Most people's commonsense moral intuition would disagree, indicating that there are values that can (sometimes at least) supersede simple utility. It should be the utilitarian's task to defend the eating of the child in order to prove that utility is the supreme value. Arguing that the other value is just utility in disguise allows one to assume that utility is prime without proving so.
I understood that t everything can reduce to utility is simply not borne out in common moral experience, and should not just be taken as an assumption. As a human we always learn from our experience, as well as the morality of our life and acknowledgment of first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary