Philosophy of Kant's Deontology Deontological Essay

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As advanced by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, it is a system built entirely on the effects or consequences of an action, regardless of the intentions. This makes it quite clearly the opposite of deontology; according to deontological ethics, telling a lie is wrong even if it saves a million lives. According to utilitarianism, even doing something purposefully bad would be good if it accidentally had a good effect. In order to measure the morality of an act, its total utility -- the overall effect it has on all persons involved -- is determined, and anything that leads to more good than bad is considered ethically correct. Utilitarian ethics is often summed up in the phrase, "the greatest good for the greatest number."

For Bentham and Mill, "good" was measured in happiness, which was also equated with the absence of pain. The specific calculus Bentham developed to measure happiness included intensity, duration, likelihood, extent, and several other descriptive features of both pleasure and pain (Bentham).

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The result was the overall utility of a given act. Each scenario where action is required present many options, and the one with the highest utility would, according to the system of Utilitarianism, be the most moral or ethical action to take, regardless of what that action was. If killing an innocent man caused everyone happiness, it would be moral.

It is very easy to see that there are problems with the utilitarian system. Mill somewhat addresses them by introducing the idea of desire, and realizing that we may put off things that cause immediate happiness to reach long-term goals, such as foregoing a favorite food in order to lose weight. Thus, people would be more prudent then to go around killing innocent men, or their society would eventually become bloodthirsty and full of criminals. Still, judging morality based solely on consequence seems as foolhardy as basing it solely on intention -- a mixture would seem to work….....

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