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Summary Of John Stewart Mill's Utilitarianism

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Summary Of John Stewart Mill's Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
In this essay, I will give a short summary of John Stewart Mill’s Utilitarianism. I will then examine the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism as illustrated in Mill’s Utilitarianism and point out that there are more dilemmas than advantages in Utilitarianism.
In John Stewart Mill’s Utilitarianism, he begins by presenting a doctrine of ethics based on utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle. He sets forth the idea that the only things that people want are happiness and absence of pain, and that all things people desire are for pleasure or prevention of pain. Mill’s then points out that humans pleasures are much more sophisticated than those of animals because humans are aware of higher faculties. This points out that there are some pleasures that are better or higher than others. Given that we are aware of those higher faculties, he states that when given the choice of different pleasures, men will get more satisfaction from those that allure to their higher faculties than those that don’t. Therefore Mill’s claims that “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” or it is better to know about those higher pleasures than not to know (MacKinnon 1995). Mill then goes on to describe virtue as part of a person’s happiness; …show more content…
For instance, there is the subject of money. It is no secrete that humans enjoy money, and money brings happiness. The utilitarian view states that once people know the joy of money, they will be less happy if they don’t have it. An objection to that is if a person is in a life or death situation, they will usually give up all of the money they have just to save their life. When this happens, the person doesn’t regret giving all of their money away to save their life, they are happy that they are
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