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Utilitarian Strategies: Finding a Single Measure
Goods Versus Other Goods: “Pick the greater good”
Each choice has benefits and costs, choice is based on the greatest net benefit.
Net benefit=total benefit over total cost or maximize utility
Must consider future/expected benefits and costs and choices can be difficult.
Review carefully the trade-offs or opportunity costs
Decision: How do we decide? Try to quantify the various benefits and costs.
What are the questions that need to be asked? Research factual information.
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Goods versus other kinds of values.
Utilitarian believe all values can be stated as “goods”. One family
Greatest happiness becomes utilitarianism’s single measure for all moral conflicts.
What is “Cashing them out”? Benefit and cost
Values That Don’t “Cash Out”
Translation
Hyper truthfulness
Fairness-not always good
Stealing and kidnapping to save someone life?
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Non-Utilitarian Strategies: Prioritizing Values
Right and Virtue Moral Families offer a more moderate response than the
Utilitarian
Right and Virtue suggest prioritize conflicting moral values or
ranking.
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Rights Versus Other Rights
Basic right comes first
Right of life, right of safety, right of ownership, over other rights
Right of free speech over unpleasant things about you or me.
Uniformed voters have a right to vote
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Rights Versus Goods
Intuitions?
Airplane crash-----What matters first?
Kant-Moral thinking must be from a universal point of view not one person’s
particular point of view.
Rawls states that we must choose rules that establish a basic equality
of access to the fundamental goods of society, allowing inequality only
when inequalities benefit the least well off segments of society.
Non-Utilitarian Strategies: Prioritizing Values
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The Priority of Virtues
Which virtue is most basic?
Answer: theory of human nature or the function of human beings.
Rational virtues are most basic-Aristotle.
Faith and communion with God are most basic-Aquinas
Modern virtue theories are more contextual.
Specific virtues may have priority over other values in specific
situations or for specific people.
Virtues in general versus virtues in specifics.
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When Theories Stalemate
Controversial? YES!
Can Utilitarian Translation Work?
Legal: Fairness, no. Everyone deserves a fair trail and innocence is
assumed.
Rights: Liberty, free speech serves social utility
Individual rights versus social rights?
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to
be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” John Stuart Mill
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Problems with Prioritizing
Non-utilitarian do not deny the diversity of values-they do not seek to
reduce all values to one type-but only to aim to place certain values first,
before others, when conflicts arise and choices have to be made.
Priority is hard to establish. Values may not be so efficient or convenient
but are still important, indeed essential. It does not establish priority.
Conclusion: Ethical theories are limited tools
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Exercises and Notes:
When Values Clash
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