The flaw of utilitarianism essay

The Challenge of Environmental Ethics Suppose putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area.

Posted on September 30, by Scott Alexander [Content warning: Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection.

They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion. Later, it comes out that the beloved nobleman did not in fact kill his good-for-nothing brother.

Background

The good-for-nothing brother killed the beloved nobleman and stole his identity. Now the townspeople want to see him lynched or burned alive, and it is only the priest who — consistently — offers a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. The priest tells them: You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce.

He further notes that this is why the townspeople can self-righteously consider themselves more compassionate and forgiving than he is. Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard.

The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.

Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent. You can have all the Utility Points you want.

The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds? The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why. Of course I have nothing against gay people!

Flaws with Utilitarianism - Essay - Tommy

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation. We have a lot of people — like the Emperor — boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

This is really surprising.On the th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth on May 5, , it isn’t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete.

Such a chart represents some of the overlap and tensions between existentialist and absurdist approaches to meaning.

While absurdism can be seen as a kind of response to existentialism, it can be debated exactly how substantively the two positions differ from each other.

Among the most glaring problems that I see with Utilitarianism is its inclusion of animals under the umbrella that blankets this theory. It seems irrefutable that there exists an inordinate number of cases where the consequence that is against the best interest of an animal is favorable to humans, yet that dictating action is one that has been continually /5(1).

There was a pretty massive shift in the s and s when northern Democrats starting supporting the civil rights movement (among other things). The Flaw in Utilitarian Theory This 3 page paper argues that utilitarianism is inadequate to explore the nuances of ethical thought.

A humorous case study concerning Keebler elves is examined. It too all of nine hours for “Apply Yourself” programmers to figure out what went wrong, before they were able to patch the security flaw within their system, after the message was posted.