Consequentialism and the Law in Medicine - Philosophical Foundations of And, it's a form of lying and cheating. people don't agree on what should be assessed in calculating good consequences. Jack had no idea how to identify gold. Workplace Example of Utilitarianism Ethics | FutureofWorking.com In other words, ethical judgments should be based on the outcome or consequence of a particular course of action rather than on ones intentions or beliefs. Learn more about our academic and editorial standards. An action that brings about more benefit than harm is good, while an action that causes more harm than benefit is not. If you happen to be in charge of setting speed limits, you might be thinking that a bad result is a death: the fewer deaths, the better. A great example of this would be at the beginning of . A Framework for Making Ethical Decisions However, they are still important considerations when making moral decisions. The utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham is a well known example of consequentialism. However, in letting the missile launch, thousands of people will die. These variations are themselves derived in the same way as the general rules. Suppose you are on average just as happy as I am, but you live twice as long. 3. If only permanent things mattered, then your happiness and misery in this life would not matter at all; but surely they do matter. Read more. Another reason is that when there is more equality in the main external goods, the basic conditions of peoples lives will be more similar and people will find it easier to understand and sympathize with each other. Now in one sense your prescription was wrong, but in another sense it was morally right. One reply to this objection is that since you know better how to help yourself and those near to you, you will get better results if you focus on them rather than people strange to you or out of view. (From 1), It can never be right to choose something worse over something better, when nothing else is at stake. Various nonconsequentialist views are that morality is all about doing ones duty, respecting rights, obeying nature, obeying God, obeying ones own heart, actualizing ones own potential, being reasonable, respecting all people, or not interfering with othersno matter the consequences. This point can be expressed by saying that there is a 50% epistemic probability of heads, or that the reasonably expectable consequences of pushing the Toss button include a 50% epistemic chance of heads. For example, welfare consequentialism, or welfarism, maintains that all that matters or is good is welfare, or well-being. Sale of Kidneys for Transplantation (But see Tnnsj (1988), 41ff.) Amartya Sen defends the capability approach (CA) and the "discipline of consequential evaluation" which suggests that his CA is consistent with some form of "consequentialism". People disagree with each other about the morality of using human embryos for stem cell research, downloading copyrighted music, giving little to the poor, eating animals, having certain kinds of sex, and many other things. So if your action does vastly more good than what most other people would do in similar circumstances, but you could have chosen an action that would have done even a little more, Plain Consequentialism says that what you did was morally wrong. There are more versions of consequentialism than are presented above. This Double Consequentialism differs from the Dual Consequentialism of 1.e above only in point (ii), on the morally right action. Web Privacy Policy Actions are transient things, soon gone forever.