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Drunk Driving

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In 2012, 10,322 people were killed and approximately 345,000 were injured from drunk driving. Each crash, each death, and each injury impacts not only the person or people in the crash, but family, friends, classmates, coworkers and more. Even those who have not been directly touched help pay the $132 billion yearly price tag of drunk driving. This semester we have analyzed different actions from the perspectives of Kantianism, Utilitarianism, Consequentialism, and Virtue Ethics, so that’s what I have chosen to do for drunk driving as my last journal entry.
Immanuel Kant believed acts were justified when they came from moral obligations. As humans we must treat everyone with respect, never treat anyone as a means to an end, and treat each person as an autonomous person. If someone chooses to drunk drive, it does not matter how old they are, they are not treating themselves or the other drives or pedestrians with respect. And if they lie to the passengers and say that they are sober, it is even worse. Therefore, under Kantianism, it cannot be considered to be a universal law.
Consequentialism holds that the consequences of one's actions are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that action, in other words, “the ends justify the means.” The best possibility of an end when a person chooses to drunken drive is that they arrive at their destination. There are other means of transportation that could have allowed them to get their safety, and in the mean time they are risking their lives and the lives of almost everyone around them when they are in the driver’s seat. In effect, the ends do not justify the means because the ends are just arriving at a different location and the means is the potential death of a human being.
Utilitarianism is an ethical tradition that directed us to decide based on overall consequences of our acts. The

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