Theories Of Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the ethical viewpoint that every decision should be based on trying to create the most amount of “good” for the most people. The “good” in this case is the utility – the positive consequence we should strive for. Utility is the foundation of utilitarianism, as the name suggests, and it keeps the welfare of people as its highest consideration. Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, proposed his own idea of how utilitarianism should work. He determined that utility could be measured based on pleasure and, conversely, that there must be something opposite of pleasure – pain. In order to process calculations, he assigned pleasure the unit of “hedon”. Thus, Bentham’s simple, hedonistic utilitarianism was born. In the case of
I think it’s morally correct for the one to suffer instead of the many. However, one point that Bentham neglects to address due to the narrowness of included factors is the fact that the traffic light was malfunctioning. The pedestrians didn’t know they were putting themselves in harm’s way. So while I ultimately agree the car should be programmed to hit the barrier, I don’t think the hedonistic utilitarianism view is enough to justify it. Too many variables are present to use such an elementary train of thought. Another reason I think the car should hit the barrier is because I believe motor transportation should always be second to pedestrians. By purchasing a car, I believe drivers should generally be responsible for accidents; they chose to utilize a more dangerous mode of transportation. With that, they should then, by all costs, try to avoid injuring any pedestrians. Returning to the five versus the one, a thought crosses my mind concerning the ethical implications of programming the car. Yes, I think it’s better for the car to swerve into the barrier to save the five. But what if there was only one pedestrian? Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism works well in the case of five pedestrians because of the imbalance of numbers. If it were one versus another, the difference between each result would be almost the same. Should cars try to count the number of people in the way and make its decision based on the result? Simply put, I believe these kind of moral dilemmas are not as straightforward as Bentham would like to view