Aristotle and Utilitarianism Is Actually Essay

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This, according to Aristotle, may well militate against reason, and Aristotle would therefore find fault with the utilitarian's conclusion.

Aristotle also insists on excellence of character and being of great soul (magnanimous), which is the level deserving of highest praise. A person also has to be just (Bostock, 2000). Utilitarianism can come into difficulties in that it may, paradoxically, be harmful when it focuses on the influence of pleasure or pain to the greatest amount of people sacrificing the pleasure of the minority in the process. History accords us many instances in which the pleasure of a few has been sacrificed in order to accommodate the happiness of a majority. This, to Aristotle may not have been just. In conclusion, even though Aristotle agreed that humans seek happiness and that happiness is our greatest good, it seems to me that utilitarians and Aristotle differ in their disparate ways of defining happiness and, consequently, in their different prescriptions of achieving this happiness. To utilitarians, the prescription lies in helping the greatest amount of people achieve the greatest amount of happiness. Happiness is not specified, but it seems to mean physical happiness. Aristotle acknowledges that different levels of happiness are available to the human, but he sees the most intense and highest level of happiness as consisting in that called 'eudemonia' i.e. A sort of bliss or contentment where the highest kind can be achieved via contemplation.

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For utilitarians, therefore, their ideal lies on a social scale and is a prescription for disseminating social goods on a wide scale, helping us distinguish in tricky political situations who should be serviced first, and in restrictive circumstances, who should receive the greatest good. To Aristotle, however, his ideas refer to the human alone and refer to excellence of character rather than social welfare or benefits. Nonetheless, despite this great difference, Aristotle sees the human as one distinguished by reason rather than carnal pleasure and even though acknowledging that carnal pleasure exists and must be satisfied, his optimal human society, it seems to me, would be one that centers around reason, namely contemplation and acts of magnanimity and justice. Towards that end, if practicing utilitarianism in its basic sense he might incorporate it with reason in the manner of two-level utilitarianism that states the one should normally use 'intuitive' thinking since this usually maximizes happiness, but one should occasionally ascend to the higher level of reason in order to act as correctly as possible (Hare, 1981).

Nonetheless, utilitarianism essentially contradicts deontological ethics (which does not regard the consequences of an act as a determinant of its moral worth) and virtue ethics (which focus on character, and it seems to me that Aristotle was a proponent of both......

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