PHL275H1 Lecture Notes - Cn Tower, Consequentialism
Document Summary
Normative ethics-claims about what is right and wrong. Normative ethical theories-philosophical theories that try to identify the fundamental ethical principles that explain why particular acts are right or wrong. Utilitarianism-simple principle, has just one fundamental premise, that an act is right when it will result in the most happiness possible, or the greatest surplus of happiness over unhappiness possible. Hare-utilitarianism combined three ideas: consequentialism, hedonism/welfarism and impartiality/summation. Many people think that utilitarianism is nice in theory but is impossible to apply. To know whether a particular act is right or wrong, you need to know the consequences it will bring into indefinite future. We can"t do that, and therefore we can never know what"s right, which makes utilitarianism useless as a moral theory. This isn"t a decisive objection: (a) we often don"t know what"s right ex. But we can often be quite sure that a given act has overall good or bad consequences.
