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Examples Of Utilitarianism

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So far, we’ve been imagining that a utilitarian would evaluate the ethicality of an action one action at time. Suppose, for example, that we want to know whether or not you should cheat on an upcoming exam, so we ask a utilitarian “Should this person cheat on the test?” The utilitarian would need to know many specific facts about the particular test we have in mind, including whether or not what your chances are of getting caught cheating, what grade you’d probably get if you didn’t cheat, and what grade you’d probably get if you did cheat, in the short and long term. Only then would the utilitarian be able to tell whether or not you should cheat on the exam. On the one hand, if it turns out that you’ll never need to use the material later …show more content…
“Nobody ever cheats in general,”, “People cheat on specific exams.” Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. It all depends upon the consequences of that particular act of cheating. This kind of utilitarianism is called “act utilitarianism,” because it evaluates actions one at a time, saying that an action is good if it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and bad if it produces unhappiness. Act utilitarianism only requires us to answer one question – “Does this particular action maximize happiness?” To that extent it’s a pretty simple ethical theory, although, as we’ve seen, the process of answering that question can be very complex because it needs to take into account many features of the action being evaluated. The general rule that the student would be following if she did cheat and decided that the rule would be something like ‘cheat on exams’ then consider whether this rule, if generally followed, would maximize happiness. And I think it’s clear that it

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