utilitarianism examples in everyday life essay

10 Utilitarianism Examples (Plus Pros and Cons)

Tio Gabunia (B.Arch, M.Arch)

Tio Gabunia is an academic writer and architect based in Tbilisi. He has studied architecture, design, and urban planning at the Georgian Technical University and the University of Lisbon. He has worked in these fields in Georgia, Portugal, and France. Most of Tio’s writings concern philosophy. Other writings include architecture, sociology, urban planning, and economics.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

The core idea of utilitarianism is that we ought to act in a way that maximizes happiness for the greatest number. So, the morally right action is, according to utilitarians, the action that produces the most good.

Examples of utilitarianism include effective altruism, bulldozing someone’s home for a highway, and redistribution of excess money from the rich to the poor.

It is an ethical theory developed to determine what we morally ought to do. It is a variety of consequentialism . That is, utilitarianism takes the consequences that action produces as the only relevant factor to determining whether that action is or isn’t morally permissible.

Utilitarianism Definition

Utilitarianism is the view that one ought to promote maximal well-being, welfare, or utility. The theory evaluates the moral rightness of actions, rules, policies, motives, virtues, social institutions, etc. in terms of what delivers the most good to the most people.

According to MacAskill, Meissner, and Chappell (2022), all utilitarian theories share four defining characteristics:

• Consequentialism: The view that one ought to act in a way that promotes good outcomes.
• Welfarism: The view that only the welfare or well-being of individuals determines the value of an outcome.
• Impartiality: The view that the identity of individuals is irrelevant to the moral value of an outcome. The interests of all individuals hold equal moral weight.
• Aggregationism: The view that the value of the world is the sum of the values of its parts. The parts are experiences, lives, societies, and so on.

Any theory that denies any of the elements above is not utilitarian. For example, a non-consequentialist might hold that actions can be inherently right or wrong regardless of the outcomes they produce.

Utilitarian Case study: Jeremy Bentham

A key feature of utilitarianism has always been its focus on practical action. Jeremy Bentham was one person who highlighted this in his writing.

He advocated for the rights of animals when there were no laws protecting animals from cruelty. He advocated for improving the conditions of prisoners and the poor.

Utilitarians advocated for broadening suffrage to extend it to women. They advocated for women’s rights more generally. Bentham advocated for homosexual rights. In these and many other areas, utilitarians supported policies that are today part of common sense (Lazari-Radek & Singer, 2017).

Other important contributors to utilitarianism include John Stuart Mill (1871), Henry Sidgwick (1874), Richard M. Hare (1993), and Peter Singer (Lazari-Radek & Singer, 2017).

Utilitarianism Examples

• Redistributing money to the poor : Wealth and income have a diminishing marginal utility. The more wealth you have, the less well-being you get from additional money. It is, therefore, a utilitarian choice of a government to redistribute money to the poor who need it more than the rich do (MacAskill & Meissner, 2022).
• Effective altruism : Effective altruism is a research field that aims to identify the world’s most vital problems and tries to find the most effective solutions to them. This is a philosophy and social movement endorsed by many utilitarians, most notably Peter Singer and William MacAskill. Not all effective altruists are utilitarians, but many utilitarians find this movement especially appealing.
• Global health and development : This is a particularly important area for utilitarians because it has a great track record of improving overall well-being. Donating to organizations that give people access to better healthcare is one of the most important causes for utilitarians.
• Farm animal welfare : For utilitarians, animals matter and humans are the cause of a large amount of their unnecessary suffering. There are ways to reduce the suffering of farmed animals. These include campaigns to make large retailers cut caged eggs out of their supply chains, donating money to animal charities, reducing meat consumption, improving the quality of animal shelters or farms, and so on.
• Reducing existential risks : The value of our actions, according to utilitarians, depends largely on how those actions will affect the future in the long run. Existential threats such as a nuclear war, a global pandemic, extreme climate change, and so on are, therefore, of pressing concern for utilitarians.
• Career choices : Many utilitarians emphasize the importance of choosing a career path that allows you to do the most overall good in the long run. This doesn’t involve much of a personal sacrifice, since the job you find satisfying is very often the one that allows you to help the largest number of people.
• Outreach : Promoting utilitarian ideas is itself considered by many utilitarians to be a morally good action. This is because promoting utilitarian ideas is likely to increase the overall well-being of individuals. The people you inspire will do several times as much good as you could have done alone.
• Women’s suffrage: Philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued for women’s suffrage from a universalist perspective. By increasing women’s rights, benefits are distributed to a greater number of people and therefore it suits a utilitarian ethic.
• Bulldoze a house to build a highway: If a house stands in the way of a highway being built, a utilitarian perspective may argue that the house should be bulldozed. More benefit to more people will come from one person losing their house in return for millions of people getting faster access to work every day. This is called the ‘rights objection’ to utilitarianism.
• Organ transplant hypothesis: There is a hospital with five people requiring transplants – a heart, a kidney, a foot, a liver, and bone marrow. The greatest good for the most people could theoretically justify killing one person so their organs can be donated to save five people.

Pros of Utilitarianism

• Simplicity : The core of utilitarianism is easy to understand and apply. The fundamental question of ethics is: “What should I do?” Utilitarianism gives a very straightforward answer: The right thing to do is to bring about the greatest possible net increase in the surplus of happiness over suffering. This short answer gives everything one might need, at least in principle, to analyze what one ought to do in any possible situation (Lazari-Radek & Singer, 2017, p. xix).
• Intuitiveness : It is impossible to prove all claims within a given theory. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, “at the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded” (Wittgenstein, 1969, p. 33). Intuitiveness is, therefore, a vital aspect of any moral theory. The axiomatic parts of any ethical theory must be intuitive for the theory to be successful or convincing. Acting to promote the greatest good for the greatest number intuitively seems like an aim worth pursuing. This is because almost everyone agrees that happiness is good and suffering is bad.
• Practicality : Utilitarian theory is immediately practical. The historical record shows that the causes utilitarians advocated for, such as universal suffrage, animal rights, gay rights, global health, and so on have become more and more important for the world. Utilitarianism seems to be effective because it can be easily applied.
• Impartiality : The moral atrocities of the past were often sanctioned by the dominant societal norms of the time. A theory that is impartial and expands the moral circle as much as possible is, therefore, more appealing to us today. Utilitarianism, because of its commitment to giving equal weight to the interests of every individual, is impartial (Chappell & Meissner, 2022).

Cons of Utilitarianism

There are many objections to utilitarianism. Most of these are based on the idea that utilitarianism often leads to counterintuitive claims and conclusions about action (MacAskill et al., 2022).

The following list is incomplete, but it covers the most common objections raised against utilitarianism:

• The alienation objection claims that utilitarianism is cold and impersonal, thereby alienating us from the particular people and projects that truly matter to us.
• The demandingness objection claims that utilitarianism is too demanding because it requires excessive self-sacrifice.
• The equality objection claims that utilitarianism ignores, or doesn’t give enough value to equality and distributive justice .
• The mere means objection claims that utilitarianism treats people merely as means to the greater good. This objection is particularly popular with the followers of Kant (Kant, 1785/1993, p. 36).
• The rights objection charges utilitarianism with being overly permissive, claiming that utilitarianism might allow infringing upon the rights of others to maximize overall well-being.
• The separateness of persons objection claims that utilitarianism neglects the boundaries between individuals to maximize overall well-being.
• The special obligations objection holds that utilitarianism is too impartial and does not account for the special obligations we have to our friends or family members.

Utilitarianism is one of the most widespread and intuitive approaches to ethics. It gives straightforward answers and actionable advice to those who subscribe to it.

Like any moral theory, it has many arguments for and against it. It was first fully articulated in the nineteenth century and is still an important and controversial ethical theory.

Bentham, J. (1879). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation . Clarendon Press.

Brink, D. (2022). Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/mill-moral-political/

Chappell, R.Y. and Meissner, D. (2022). Arguments for Utilitarianism. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Introduction to Utilitarianism . https://www.utilitarianism.net/arguments-for-utilitarianism , accessed 11/18/2022.

Driver, J. (2022). The History of Utilitarianism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/utilitarianism-history/

Hare, R. M. (1993). Essays in Ethical Theory . Clarendon Press.

Kant, I. (1993). Grounding for the metaphysics of morals ; with, On a supposed right to lie because of philanthropic concerns . Indianapolis : Hackett Pub. Co. (Original work published 1785) http://archive.org/details/groundingformet000kant

Lazari-Radek, K. de, & Singer, P. (2017). Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press.

MacAskill, W. and Meissner, D. (2022). Acting on Utilitarianism. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Introduction to Utilitarianism . https://www.utilitarianism.net/acting-on-utilitarianism , accessed 11/18/2022.

MacAskill, W., Meissner, D., and Chappell, R.Y. (2022). Introduction to Utilitarianism. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Introduction to Utilitarianism . https://www.utilitarianism.net/introduction-to-utilitarianism , accessed 11/18/2022.

MacAskill, W., Meissner, D., and Chappell, R.Y. (2022). Objections to Utilitarianism and Responses. In R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill (eds.), An Introduction to Utilitarianism . https://www.utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism , accessed 11/18/2022.

Mill, J. S. (1871). Utilitarianism . Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.

Sidgwick, H. (1874). The Methods of Ethics . Macmillan.

Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty . Basil Blackwell.

• Tio Gabunia (B.Arch, M.Arch) #molongui-disabled-link 6 Types of Societies (With 21 Examples)
• Tio Gabunia (B.Arch, M.Arch) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Public Health Policy Examples
• Tio Gabunia (B.Arch, M.Arch) #molongui-disabled-link 15 Cultural Differences Examples
• Tio Gabunia (B.Arch, M.Arch) #molongui-disabled-link Social Interaction Types & Examples (Sociology)

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 23 Achieved Status Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 15 Ableism Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 25 Defense Mechanisms Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 15 Theory of Planned Behavior Examples

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

Basic concepts

Methodologies.

• Antecedents of utilitarianism among the ancients
• Growth of classical English utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism since the late 19th century
• Effects of utilitarianism in other fields
• Summary and evaluation

utilitarianism

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Santa Clara University - Markkula Center for Applied Ethics - Calculating Consequences:The Utilitarian Approach to Ethics
• World History Encyclopedia - Utilitarianism
• Humanities LibreTexts - Utilitarianism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The History of Utilitarianism
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Act and Rule Utilitarianism
• Open Okstate - Utilitarianism
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Utilitarianism
• Rebus Community - Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics - Utilitarianism
• Table Of Contents

utilitarianism , in normative ethics , a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action (or type of action) is right if it tends to promote happiness or pleasure and wrong if it tends to produce unhappiness or pain—not just for the performer of the action but also for everyone else affected by it. Utilitarianism is a species of consequentialism , the general doctrine in ethics that actions (or types of action) should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences. Utilitarianism and other consequentialist theories are in opposition to egoism , the view that each person should pursue his or her own self-interest, even at the expense of others, and to any ethical theory that regards some actions (or types of action) as right or wrong independently of their consequences ( see deontological ethics ). Utilitarianism also differs from ethical theories that make the rightness or wrongness of an action dependent upon the motive of the agent—for, according to the utilitarian, it is possible for the right thing to be done from a bad motive. Utilitarians may, however, distinguish the aptness of praising or blaming an agent from whether the action was right.

(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)

The nature of utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question “What ought a person to do?” The answer is that a person ought to act so as to maximize happiness or pleasure and to minimize unhappiness or pain.

In the notion of consequences the utilitarian includes all of the good and bad produced by the action, whether arising after the action has been performed or during its performance. If the difference in the consequences of alternative actions is not great, some utilitarians would not regard the choice between them as a moral issue. According to Mill, acts should be classified as morally right or wrong only if the consequences are of such significance that a person would wish to see the agent compelled, not merely persuaded and exhorted, to act in the preferred manner.

In assessing the consequences of actions, utilitarianism relies upon some theory of intrinsic value : something is held to be good in itself, apart from further consequences, and all other values are believed to derive their worth from their relation to this intrinsic good as a means to an end. Bentham and Mill were hedonists ; i.e, they analyzed happiness as a balance of pleasure over pain and believed that these feelings alone are of intrinsic value and disvalue. Utilitarians also assume that it is possible to compare the intrinsic values produced by two alternative actions and to estimate which would have better consequences. Bentham believed that a hedonic calculus is theoretically possible. A moralist, he maintained, could sum up the units of pleasure and the units of pain for everyone likely to be affected, immediately and in the future, and could take the balance as a measure of the overall good or evil tendency of an action. Such precise measurement as Bentham envisioned is perhaps not essential, but it is nonetheless necessary for the utilitarian to make some interpersonal comparisons of the values of the effects of alternative courses of action.

As a normative system providing a standard by which an individual ought to act and by which the existing practices of society, including its moral code, ought to be evaluated and improved, utilitarianism cannot be verified or confirmed in the way in which a descriptive theory can, but it is not regarded by its exponents as simply arbitrary. Bentham believed that only in terms of a utilitarian interpretation do words such as “ought,” “right,” and “wrong” have meaning and that, whenever people attempt to combat the principle of utility , they do so with reasons drawn from the principle itself. Bentham and Mill both believed that human actions are motivated entirely by pleasure and pain, and Mill saw that motivation as a basis for the argument that, since happiness is the sole end of human action, the promotion of happiness is the test by which to judge all human conduct.

One of the leading utilitarians of the late 19th century, the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick , rejected such theories of motivation as well as Bentham’s theory of the meaning of moral terms and sought to support utilitarianism by showing that it follows from systematic reflection on the morality of “ common sense .” Most of the requirements of commonsense morality , he argued, could be based upon utilitarian considerations. In addition, he reasoned that utilitarianism could solve the difficulties and perplexities that arise from the vagueness and inconsistencies of commonsense doctrines.

Most opponents of utilitarianism have held that it has implications contrary to their moral intuitions—that considerations of utility, for example, might sometimes sanction the breaking of a promise. Much of the defense of utilitarian ethics has consisted in answering these objections, either by showing that utilitarianism does not have the implications that its opponents claim it has or by arguing against the opponents’ moral intuitions . Some utilitarians, however, have sought to modify the utilitarian theory to accommodate the objections.

One such criticism is that, although the widespread practice of lying and stealing would have bad consequences, resulting in a loss of trustworthiness and security, it is not certain that an occasional lie to avoid embarrassment or an occasional theft from a rich person would not have good consequences and thus be permissible or even required by utilitarianism. But the utilitarian readily answers that the widespread practice of such acts would result in a loss of trustworthiness and security. To meet the objection to not permitting an occasional lie or theft, some philosophers have defended a modification labelled “ rule ” utilitarianism. It permits a particular act on a particular occasion to be adjudged right or wrong according to whether it is in keeping with or in violation of a useful rule, and a rule is judged useful or not by the consequences of its general practice . Mill has sometimes been interpreted as a “rule” utilitarian, whereas Bentham and Sidgwick were “ act” utilitarians.

Another objection, often posed against the hedonistic value theory held by Bentham, holds that the value of life is more than a balance of pleasure over pain. Mill, in contrast to Bentham, discerned differences in the quality of pleasures that make some intrinsically preferable to others independently of intensity and duration (the quantitative dimensions recognized by Bentham). Some philosophers in the utilitarian tradition have recognized certain wholly nonhedonistic values without losing their utilitarian credentials. Thus, the English philosopher G.E. Moore , one of the founders of contemporary analytic philosophy , regarded many kinds of consciousness —including friendship, knowledge, and the experience of beauty—as intrinsically valuable independently of pleasure, a position labelled “ ideal ” utilitarianism. Even in limiting the recognition of intrinsic value and disvalue to happiness and unhappiness, some philosophers have argued that those feelings cannot adequately be further broken down into terms of pleasure and pain and have thus preferred to defend the theory in terms of maximizing happiness and minimizing unhappiness. It is important to note, however, that, even for the hedonistic utilitarians, pleasure and pain are not thought of in purely sensual terms; pleasure and pain for them can be components of experiences of all sorts. Their claim is that, if an experience is neither pleasurable nor painful, then it is a matter of indifference and has no intrinsic value.

Another objection to utilitarianism is that the prevention or elimination of suffering should take precedence over any alternative act that would only increase the happiness of someone already happy. Some modern utilitarians have modified their theory to require this focus or even to limit moral obligation to the prevention or elimination of suffering—a view labelled “negative” utilitarianism.

• Famine, Affluence, and Morality
• Utilitarianism: Simply Explained

Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians

Introduction.

On the face of it, utilitarianism is extraordinarily demanding . It seems to entail extreme levels of self-sacrifice and impartiality: that we must not in any way prioritize ourselves and our family members over distant strangers. And it seems to require us to spend every waking hour obsessing over how we can maximize our positive impact on the world.

But that analysis misses that humans have psychological limitations. If utilitarians were expected to live up to such strict standards, they would risk psychological collapse. And as we will see, it would harm utilitarians’ incentives, thereby reducing their output and positive impact.

Utilitarians who are looking to apply utilitarianism in the real world should therefore adopt a more sophisticated strategy. They should study the psychological obstacles to utilitarianism and prioritize overcoming those that both greatly reduce their utilitarian impact and are feasible to overcome. By contrast, they should not try to overcome obstacles that do not reduce their impact much or are not possible to overcome.

In order to overcome the most important obstacles, they should cultivate a set of utilitarian virtues. To identify these virtues, we draw on two sources. First, research on the psychology of utilitarianism and related fields of psychology. Second, lessons from the effective altruism community . Though utilitarianism is distinct from effective altruism, there are many effective altruist utilitarians, and they have put a lot of thought into how to apply utilitarianism in practice. Thus, it is only natural to draw on their experiences.

Our list of utilitarian virtues is as follows. 1

• Moderate altruism : to partly overcome selfishness and give some resources to others.
• Moral expansiveness : to overcome our natural partiality against distant beneficiaries.
• Effectiveness-focus : to overcome our emotional numbness to the scale of a problem and our biases in favor of ineffective ways of helping others.
• Truth-seeking : to overcome motivated reasoning and a host of epistemic biases in order to find the most effective ways of maximizing well-being.
• Collaborativeness : to engage in fruitful collaboration with other utilitarians and be willing to compromise with those who hold differing moral views.
• Determination : to consistently act on utilitarian principles with persistence and deliberation.

Lastly, we discuss how utilitarianism relates to common sense virtues and common sense ethics. We argue that when we move from the philosophical seminar room to the real world, utilitarianism does not say that we should harm others for the greater good in the way it naively may seem . But although utilitarianism converges with common sense ethics in that regard, it departs from it in other key ways: for instance, by emphasizing the importance of caring for distant beneficiaries (moral expansiveness) and the importance of always choosing the most effective ways of helping others (effectiveness-focus).

Moderate Altruism

Utilitarianism says that everything else being equal, everyone’s well-being is equally valuable. That means that we have no intrinsic reasons to prioritize ourselves over others. This obviously clashes strongly with our natural selfishness.

It seems both feasible and impactful to partially overcome our selfishness. To do that, utilitarians should cultivate the virtue of altruism. The more difficult question is what level of altruism they should aim for. Should they aim for extreme levels of altruism, where they, for instance, give away almost all of their money—and perhaps even one of their kidneys? Or should they settle for more moderate levels of altruism?

Extreme levels of altruism are very uncommon. Only a tiny fraction of people donate a kidney to a stranger. 2 Similarly, very few give away almost all of their money. That suggests that it is very difficult to be completely unselfish—that there are formidable psychological obstacles to extreme altruism.

Consequently, even though utilitarians do not have any intrinsic reasons to prioritize themselves over others, they have several instrumental reasons to do so. First, extreme levels of altruism would likely increase the risk of burnout, which would make you less productive and thus less impactful. Second, it would likely reduce the appeal of utilitarianism and turn people away from communities with many utilitarian members, such as the effective altruism community.

Third, the notion that you need to give away almost all your resources may make you less motivated to acquire new resources. It effectively functions as a 100% marginal tax rate. And like taxes, such a notion may affect your incentives. Even if you fully endorse utilitarian principles, you may not be able to suppress your selfish impulses fully over the long term. Therefore, your productivity may go down as your self-imposed “tax rate” goes up.

These considerations all support moderate altruism over extreme altruism. They are effectively saying that the extreme altruist will have fewer resources that they can give to people in need. The main counter-argument is that even if the extreme altruist has fewer resources, they will give a greater share of those resources to people in need; and that will increase their utilitarian impact.

While that is true, we need to compare this added impact with the impact that we can gain by addressing other psychological obstacles, via other virtues. As we shall see, most people can likely increase their utilitarian impact at least a hundred times through increasing the effectiveness of their help: for instance, by choosing to donate to the most effective charities. By contrast, increasing the amount that we help through transitioning from moderate to extreme levels of altruism likely makes a much smaller difference. It is also probably much less psychologically costly to help more effectively than to increase the amount of help that we give to extreme levels. For these reasons, it seems sensible to prioritize virtues that increase the effectiveness of our help—such as effectiveness-focus and truth-seeking—over extreme altruism. Thus, in our view, utilitarians should settle for moderate altruism.

Moral Expansiveness

Just like utilitarianism says that we have no intrinsic reason to prioritize ourselves over other people, so it says that we have no intrinsic reason to prioritize some beneficiaries over others when we are giving away resources. But just like extreme altruism clashes with our natural inclinations, so does this type of extreme impartiality . People tend to be strongly partial in favor of their family members. Such partiality is rooted in our evolutionary history, as genes favoring those who share our genes were more likely to propagate themselves. While these preferences for our kin are not completely immutable, they have proved hard to change fundamentally. For instance, attempts at communal child-rearing at Israeli kibbutzim have largely failed, as parents wanted to retain their special, partial, relationship with their children. 3

Our judgment is therefore that utilitarians need not practice such extreme impartiality, just like they need not practice extreme altruism. However, there are other forms of partiality besides that which is based on family ties. People tend to favor their compatriots over foreigners, current people over future people, humans over non-human animals, and so on. These forms of partiality seem considerably weaker, psychologically speaking, than partiality that is based on family ties. They are not rooted in shared genes, nor in personal relationships. Instead, they are rooted in membership of a group which we effectively have decided to prioritize.

One reason to believe that such partiality is more mutable is that it has weakened with time: we have, in Peter Singer’s words, gradually expanded the circle of moral concern to include more groups. 4 We have become less inclined to prioritize some people over others merely because they are members of our group. There seems to be no reason to believe that this process cannot continue.

There is also another reason why overcoming this group-based partiality seems more feasible. Impartiality with respect to your family requires you to change your life in fundamental ways. Impartiality with respect to larger groups tends to have much more modest consequences. It does affect decisions such as what charity to donate to, what party to vote for, and potentially (depending on other factors) what job to choose. But it often leaves the private and personal side of our lives relatively unaffected. In line with that, outside of work many effective altruist utilitarians lead lives that in many ways are remarkably similar to those of most people in society.

Overcoming group-based partiality is not only feasible but also impactful. As effective altruists have shown, you can often increase your impact by helping beneficiaries that are distant from us —spatially, temporally, and biologically. For instance, our money tends to “go further overseas”: donors in rich countries can do much more good by giving to the global poor than by giving to poor people in their own countries. 5 Likewise, because reducing the suffering of animals in factory farms is so neglected, donations to farm animal welfare charities can have an outsized impact. 6 Lastly, some effective altruists—so-called longtermists —think that interventions that help the distant future are still much more effective. 7

In light of these considerations, we suggest that utilitarians cultivate the virtue of moral expansiveness . 8 They should continue to expand their circle of moral concern to include more distant beneficiaries. They should not discriminate in favor of closer beneficiaries, except when they have a strong personal relationship with them. According to this view, utilitarians should permit themselves to be partial in favor of people within their personal sphere. 9 But outside of that personal sphere, they should be impartial and not discriminate against distant beneficiaries.

Effectiveness-focus

Moral expansiveness helps us overcome important obstacles to utilitarianism. But even people who are prepared to help distant beneficiaries often fail to choose the most effective ways of doing good. They are not effectiveness-focused . Though effectiveness-focus may seem similar to moral expansiveness, they are psychologically distinct. In a psychological study, we found that inclination to help distant beneficiaries is at best only weakly correlated with inclination to choose the most effective ways of doing good. 10

A key obstacle to effectiveness is our aversion to deprioritizing causes which feel worthy and deserving of support. Since our resources are limited, we have to make tough trade-offs in order to maximize our impact. We have to persistently prioritize the most effective opportunities to help others—even though this comes at the expense of less effective opportunities that still feel worthy of support. People are often averse to such deprioritization, which reduces the effectiveness of their help. 11

Another obstacle to effectiveness is that people have “pet causes”, which they prioritize even if they know that other causes are more effective. In one study, participants were informed that it is more effective to support arthritis research than to support cancer research, but most still chose to support cancer research. 12 This is a common phenomenon: people prioritize causes that they have a personal connection to or that are particularly salient and striking. For instance, our studies show that many people support disaster relief (a salient cause) even when informed that it is more effective to address recurring or permanent problems. 13

An underlying cause of the failure to choose the most effective ways of helping others is scope neglect : that our feelings do not scale in proportion to the amount of suffering that we observe. Our altruistic emotions did not evolve to help us maximize impact and are not attuned to the large differences in altruistic impact between opportunities to help others in the modern world. 14 Therefore, we do not necessarily get more motivated to help just because we could help more people.

Overcoming these obstacles to effectiveness is highly impactful. Studies show that the most effective charities are at least one hundred times more effective than the typical charity. 15 Thus, people who donate to the most emotionally appealing charities rather than to those that are most effective tend to have only a fraction of the impact that they could have had. The same is likely true of other types of help, such as direct work on an altruistic cause.

It also seems feasible to overcome these biases and develop the virtue of effectiveness-focus. Note that we do not suggest that people need to align their feelings with the scale of the observed suffering. It is not possible to feel a million times more for a million suffering people than for a single person. Instead, we are talking about behavior and actions. We are suggesting that you should choose how to help based on assessments of impact, rather than based on intuitive reactions. And changing behavior in this regard seems much easier than changing feelings. It is by no means trivial to be consistently focused on effectiveness. But at the same time, it seems far easier than to become, for example, fully selfless, or fully impartial in relation to one’s family. In our view, many effective altruists by and large do live the virtue of effectiveness-focus, showing that it is feasible to do so.

Truth-seeking

So far, we have focused on decisions where the effectiveness of different ways of helping others is known. In such cases, moral expansiveness and effectiveness-focus can help utilitarians overcome key psychological obstacles and choose the opportunities that have the greatest impact.

But more often than not, high-impact opportunities are not lined up in front of you. Instead, you have to identify the best ways of helping others yourself. At this point, there are new obstacles to utilitarianism that must be overcome.

To identify the best ways of helping, utilitarians have to analyze all the effects of their actions and arrive at an overall estimate of their impact relative to the alternatives. It goes without saying that this is hard. This is particularly true of interventions aimed at helping distant beneficiaries—which, as we have seen, may have the greatest utilitarian impact. For instance, assessing the effects of our current actions on the long-term future seems extraordinarily hard. 16

But it is not just that the problem is intrinsically difficult. Another problem resides in our own minds. A plethora of psychological biases distract us from the truth and make it harder for us to see the world as it really is. Here we will just cover a few examples.

One of the most salient epistemic problems is our tendency to engage in motivated reasoning . Instead of impartially evaluating the evidence, we tend to be biased in favor of views that we find politically convenient or like for other reasons. 17 We are also susceptible to confirmation bias , selectively seeking out evidence that supports our views while neglecting evidence that would falsify them. 18 Relatedly, we tend to be overconfident —to overestimate our own expertise relative to that of others. 19 As a result, we are often insufficiently inclined to defer to experts. For instance, donors often have little knowledge of what the most effective charities are 20 —but instead of seeking out experts, who do know, they go with their own guesses. That obviously tends to reduce the impact of their donations.

We are also, to varying degrees, cognitive misers —we do not seek out evidence to the extent that we should, and we often rely on intuition when it would be more appropriate to engage in more effortful deliberative reasoning. 21 Partly for that reason, many have not acquired the “mindware”—the concepts and the reasoning tools—that they need to estimate the relative impact of different ways of helping others. Many are unfamiliar with the concept of expected value , and their grasp of probabilistic reasoning is often shallow. 22

Because of these biases and other shortcomings, utilitarians need to cultivate the virtue of truth-seeking (or “the Scout Mindset” as Julia Galef calls it ). 23 They should cultivate open-mindedness, epistemic humility, and epistemic impartiality. 24 They should defer to experts as appropriate. They should work hard to find and analyze relevant evidence instead of going with their gut instincts. And they should acquire the scientific mindware and thinking tools that are needed to estimate impact.

Since overcoming these obstacles would allow the utilitarian to identify higher-impact ways of helping others, it would be very impactful to do so. It also seems relatively feasible: while we cannot hope to eradicate all our epistemic biases completely, we can no doubt improve. We have already made spectacular epistemic progress over the course of history—the Scientific Revolution being a salient case in point. There is no reason to believe that progress cannot continue. The effective altruism community recognizes the importance of truth-seeking, and for that reason, they celebrate it. Since humans are social creatures, that plausibly incentivizes members to cultivate truth-seeking.

The importance of truth-seeking for utilitarianism is often underrated. Arguably it is more important for utilitarianism than for common sense morality. Unlike common sense morality, utilitarianism says that you should choose the most effective ways of helping others—and to find them, you need to be truth-seeking. In that sense, real-world utilitarianism is actually quite epistemically demanding . Most discussions about utilitarianism and demandingness focus on demands on our material resources, but the epistemic demands are arguably more important when you apply utilitarianism in the real world. And for most people, it may be less draining to try to improve epistemically than to give away large material resources.

Collaborativeness

Our discussion so far has highlighted psychological obstacles that prevent individual utilitarians from maximizing their personal impact. But utilitarians also need to collaborate with others to maximize their collective impact. Here, new psychological obstacles present themselves. To overcome them, utilitarians should cultivate the virtue of collaborativeness.

As Adam Smith noted, there are large economic benefits to coordination and collaboration: to trade and to specialization. We are more effective when we divide labor between ourselves, specialize on specific tasks, and trade surplus goods and services for those that we lack. That is not only true of self-interested pursuits, but also of altruistic endeavors. Utilitarians are more effective if they are part of a community. This is what motivates the many utilitarians who have chosen to become part of the effective altruism community.

The effective altruism community is intensely collaborative. They specialize and divide tasks between themselves. Some members focus on “earning to give”—to earn as much money as possible in order to fund charities. Other members work directly for those charities. Still others provide career advice to help members choose between these options. This specialization increases the community’s impact substantially.

Another advantage of forming a community is that it can make it easier to cultivate and maintain the utilitarian virtues. Within the effective altruism community, these virtues are celebrated and seen as norms. And as we have seen, people tend to be more inclined to do things if they are celebrated and supported by norms.

Utilitarians should also be open to collaborating with people with different moral views. Toby Ord, one of the founders of effective altruism, has pioneered the concept of moral trade . 25 We trade all the time to satisfy our self-interested preferences: I give you my service in return for your goods. As Ord points out, we can also trade to satisfy our moral preferences. Suppose that Alice finds veganism much more morally important than Bob, whereas Bob feels more strongly about global poverty. Then Alice and Bob can satisfy their moral preferences better if Alice promises to give to global poverty charities provided that Bob reciprocates through becoming vegan.

Utilitarians should be open to moral trade (in an extended sense) with people they disagree with. For instance, they should avoid saying and doing things that are objectionable from the point of view of other reasonable moral perspectives unless it is strictly necessary. Anecdotally, it seems that people within the effective altruism community largely do that, and that that has helped the community to do more good.

For all these reasons, you will typically have a much greater impact if you collaborate with others, and if you join an impactful community. And yet people are often much less collaborative than would be ideal. There are several psychological obstacles that impede collaboration and the formation of a community. One of them is that people have a tendency to want to pursue their own projects, according to their own wishes. Another is that people simply fail to see how greatly altruistic collaboration could increase their impact. When it comes to for-profit companies, effectiveness tends to be very salient. We can see how much profit companies make, and how much they pay their employees. The effectiveness of altruistic projects is typically much less salient. That may cause people to underestimate how effective the most effective projects are, 26 and thereby cause them to underestimate the impact of joining one of those projects.

There is another factor that explains why people dislike moral trade in particular. They often feel outraged or disgusted over other people’s moral views and therefore refuse to cooperate or even compromise with them. 27 So moral trade does not come naturally to most people.

Though these obstacles are real, they do not seem insurmountable. We have a proof of concept in the effective altruism community, which does collaborate relatively well. While people will never become perfectly collaborative, effective altruists have shown that it is feasible to improve a lot on the status quo .

Determination

We often do not do what we on some level want to do. We plan to lose weight but keep eating too much. We plan to save for retirement but keep spending our money here and now. We endorse a stringent moral philosophy in theory but fail to act on it in practice. We suffer from intention-behavior gaps . 28

So actually acting on utilitarian principles is harder than it may seem. It is all too easy to fall back on old habits—to pursue low-impact causes or not take much altruistic action at all.

One reason is simple inertia. Another is availability bias —the tendency to do what is most salient and talked about. 29 A third is that people often take a satisficing attitude to doing good. 30 Instead of considering all the possible interventions that they could pursue, and choosing the one that is most effective (maximizing), many do a more limited search and settle for an intervention that is “good enough”.

To overcome these obstacles, utilitarians should cultivate the virtue of determination. They should actively seek out the highest-impact opportunities and avoid drifting into sub-optimal solutions. They should work as hard as necessary (though without risking burnout). And they should make sure they keep motivated over the long term, since it often takes time to have a big impact. Young people who enter a career for utilitarian reasons can typically expect their impact to peak several decades later, when they have reached more senior positions.

Without determination, there is a risk that you will not have much of an impact at all—even if you have the other utilitarian virtues. It is thus highly impactful to overcome inertia, satisficing, and related psychological obstacles by cultivating the virtue of determination. And it also seems relatively feasible. Again, it helps to have community norms. The effective altruism community celebrates determination, just like it celebrates truth-seeking: consider, for instance, the effective altruist slogan “figure out how to do the most good, and then do it ”. 31 This seems to help utilitarian community members to stay determined and action-oriented.

Utilitarianism and Common Sense Virtues

Much of the philosophical discussion about utilitarianism focuses on counterintuitive edge cases, where utilitarianism departs from common sense morality. In particular, there has been a lot of discussion about the trolley problem and related problems where you can save many people by killing one . 32 Such edge cases are useful as tests of our intuitions about whether utilitarianism is the best or most correct moral theory. But we are interested in something else, namely how utilitarianism should be applied in the real world. And in the real world, we do not encounter such edge cases very often. Thus, they are less central to real-world utilitarianism than the philosophical discussion may make it seem.

There are real-world situations that have some similarities to the trolley problem, however: situations where we could, at first glance, do good by causing harm (“instrumental harm”) or by breaking common sense norms. We could steal money to give to the poor. Or we could lie about charity effectiveness to increase donations.

While it may seem that utilitarians should engage in norm-breaking instrumental harm, a closer analysis reveals that it often carries large costs. It would lead to people taking precautions to safeguard against these kinds of harms, which would be costly for society. And it could harm utilitarians’ reputation, 33 which in turn could impair their ability to do good. In light of such considerations, many utilitarians have argued that it is better to respect common sense norms . 34 Utilitarians should adopt ordinary virtues like honesty, trustworthiness, and kindness. There is a convergence with common sense morality.

As we have seen, utilitarianism also converges considerably with common sense morality concerning altruism and impartiality. Utilitarians should not feel that they have to donate almost all of their money. And they should not force themselves to be impartial between their family and strangers.

Some generalize these insights and argue that utilitarianism converges with common sense morality more or less across the board. 35 This view says that although utilitarianism initially may seem like a radical departure from our pretheoretical ethical worldview, a closer analysis reveals that this is not so.

But while it is true that utilitarianism overlaps more with common sense morality than one might naively think, there is something that this argument misses. Utilitarians can massively increase their impact through cultivating some key virtues that are not sufficiently emphasized by common sense morality. Some charities are extraordinarily effective compared with the average charity, and some jobs are much higher-impact than others. To find those opportunities, utilitarians need to be unusually truth-seeking. And to take them, they need to be morally expansive, effectiveness-focused, and so on.

So we suggest that in order to be effective in the real world, utilitarians should stake out a middle way. They should by and large adopt the standard common sense virtues. But in addition to them, they should also adopt six virtues that go beyond the common sense virtues. While a utilitarian life is pretty normal in some ways, it is very different in others.

Some of our suggested virtues tend to be associated with utilitarianism. That may be especially true of moral expansiveness. But others do not have a salient link to utilitarianism, and do not tend to be associated with it. They include, in particular, truth-seeking, collaborativeness, and determination. None of these virtues are conceptually tied to utilitarianism, but empirically, it turns out that they are very important in order to maximize utilitarian impact in the real world.

A longer version of this article can be found here .

About the Authors

Stefan Schubert is a researcher at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, who works in the intersection of moral psychology and philosophy. His research focuses on questions related to effective altruism, such as why we don’t invest more in safe-guarding our common future.

Lucius Caviola is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. He specializes in moral psychology and is the co-author of Effective Altruism and the Human Mind (Oxford University Press, 2024).

How to Cite This Page

Want to learn more about utilitarianism.

Read about the theory behind utilitarianism:

Learn how to use utilitarianism to improve the world:

Resources and Further Reading

• Bazerman, Max (2020). Better, not perfect: a realist’s guide to maximum sustainable goodness . Harper Business.
• Bradley, Ben (2018). Contemporary Consequentialist Theories of Virtue. In The Oxford Handbook of Virtue .
• Caviola, Lucius, David Althaus, Stefan Schubert, and Joshua Lewis (2022). What psychological traits predict interest in effective altruism? Effective Altruism Forum .
• Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, and Joshua D. Greene (2021). The Psychology of (In) Effective Altruism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences .
• Crisp, Roger (1992). Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue. The Philosophical Quarterly , 42, pp. 139-160.
• de Lazari-Radek, Katarina, and Peter Singer (2013). How much more demanding is utilitarianism than common sense morality? Revue International de Philosophy , 67(4): 427–438.
• Ord, Toby (2009). Beyond Action: Applying consequentialism to decision making and motivation. D. Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford.
• Schmidt, Andreas. T. (2017). Being Good by Doing Good: Goodness and the Evaluation of Persons. Utilitas , 29(1): 3.
• Schubert, Stefan and Lucius Caviola. Virtues for Real-World Utilitarianism . In Aguiar, Fernando, Antonio Gaitán, and Hugo Viciano, Issues in Experimental Moral Philosophy , Routledge (forthcoming).
• Schubert, Stefan, Ben Garfinkel, and Owen Cotton-Barratt (2017). Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate. Effectivealtruism.org.

Videos of talks:

• Caviola, Lucius (2017). Against Naïve Effective Altruism .
• Schubert, Stefan (2019). Moral Aspirations and Psychological Limitations .
• Schubert, Stefan (2020). Naïve effective altruism and the danger of neglecting psychology .

Guest Essays

Utilitarianism and climate change, utilitarianism and nonhuman animals, moral psychology and utilitarianism, the time-relative account of interests, utilitarianism and research ethics, uncertainty and utilitarianism, buddhism and utilitarianism, utilitarianism and voting, expected utility maximization, welfare economics and interpersonal utility comparisons, naturalistic arguments for ethical hedonism, analytic hedonism and observable moral facts, bentham and criminal law.

Importantly, this list is tentative and not meant to be exhaustive.  ↩︎

Crockett, M. J., & Lockwood, P. L. (2018). Extraordinary altruism and transcending the self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22 (12): 1071–1073.  ↩︎

Christakis, Nicholas A (2019). Blueprint: The evolutionary origins of a good society . Hachette UK.  ↩︎

Singer, Peter (1981/2011). The expanding circle: Ethics, evolution, and moral progress . Princeton University Press.  ↩︎

MacAskill, William (2015). Doing good better: Effective altruism and a radical new way to make a difference . Guardian Faber Publishing.  ↩︎

Animal Charity Evaluators (2016). Why Farmed Animals .  ↩︎

Greaves, Hilary, and William MacAskill (2021). The case for strong longtermism . Global Priorities Institute, working paper, 5 .  ↩︎

Crimston, Daniel, Paul G. Bain, Matthew J. Hornsey, and Brock Bastian (2016). Moral expansiveness: Examining variability in the extension of the moral world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111(4): 636–653; Crimston, Daniel, Matthew J. Hornsey, Paul G. Bain, and Brock Bastian (2018). Toward a psychology of moral expansiveness. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 27(1): 14–19.  ↩︎

Note that since such partiality is unique to the personal sphere, this does not mean that they should permit themselves to be nepotistic in favor of family members or friends within professional or institutional contexts.  ↩︎

Caviola, Lucius, David Althaus, Stefan Schubert, and Joshua Lewis (2022). What psychological traits predict interest in effective altruism? . Effective Altruism Forum.  ↩︎

Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions.; Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, and Jason Nemirow (2020b). The many obstacles to effective giving. Judgment and Decision Making , 15(2): 159–172  ↩︎

Berman, Jonathan Z., Alixandra Barasch, Emma E. Levine, and Deborah A. Small (2018). Impediments to effective altruism: The role of subjective preferences in charitable giving. Psychological science , 29(5): 834–844.  ↩︎

Jamison, Dean et al (2006). Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries , World Bank; Ord, Toby (2013). The Moral Imperative Toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health, Center for Global Development; Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, and Jason Nemirow (2020). The many obstacles to effective giving. Judgment and Decision Making , 15(2): 159–172.  ↩︎

Burum, Bethany, Martin A. Nowak, and Moshe Hoffman (2020). An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism. Nature Human Behaviour , 1–13; Miller, Geoffrey (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature . Heinemann; Simmler, Kevin, and Robin Hanson (2017). The elephant in the brain: Hidden motives in everyday life . Oxford University Press; Lloyd, Elisabeth, David Sloan Wilson, and Elliott Sober (2011). Evolutionary mismatch and what to do about it: A basic tutorial. Evolutionary Applications , 2–4; Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby (2006). Evolutionary psychology, moral heuristics, and the law . Dahlem University Press.  ↩︎

Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, Elliot Teperman, David Moss, Spencer Greenberg, and Nadira S. Faber (2020). Donors vastly underestimate differences in charities’ effectiveness. Judgment and Decision Making , 15(4): 509–516.  ↩︎

Tarsney, Christian (2019). The epistemic challenge to longtermism . Global Priorities Institute, working paper, 10.  ↩︎

Kahan, Dan M (2015). The politically motivated reasoning paradigm, part 1: What politically motivated reasoning is and how to measure it. Emerging trends in the social and behavioral sciences: An interdisciplinary, searchable, and linkable resource : 1–16.  ↩︎

Oswald, Margit E., and Stefan Grosjean (2004). Confirmation bias. In Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgment and memory , 79.  ↩︎

Hoffrage, Ulrich (2004). Overconfidence. In Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgment and memory .  ↩︎

Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, and Jason Nemirow (2020). The many obstacles to effective giving. Judgment and Decision Making , 15(2): 159–172.  ↩︎

Stanovich, Keith E., Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak (2016). The rationality quotient: Toward a test of rational thinking . MIT press.  ↩︎

Pinker, Steven (2021). Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters . Allen Lane.  ↩︎

Galef, Julia (2021). The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t . Penguin.  ↩︎

Stanovich, Keith E., and Richard F. West (1997). Reasoning independently of prior belief and individual differences in actively open-minded thinking. Journal of Educational Psychology , 89(2): 342.  ↩︎

Ord, Toby (2015). Moral trade. Ethics , 126(1): 118–138.  ↩︎

See Caviola, Lucius, Stefan Schubert, Elliot Teperman, David Moss, Spencer Greenberg, and N. Faber (2020). Donors vastly underestimate differences in charities’ effectiveness. Judgment and Decision Making , 15:4: 509–516.  ↩︎

Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage.  ↩︎

Sheeran, Paschal, and Thomas L. Webb (2016). The intention–behavior gap. Social and personality psychology compass , 10(9): 503–518.  ↩︎

Schwarz, Norbert, and Leigh Ann Vaughn (2002). The Availability Heuristic Revisited: Ease of Recall and Content of Recall as Distinct Sources of Information. Chapter in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment , edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, 103–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  ↩︎

Misuraca, Raffaella, Palmira Faraci, Amelia Gangemi, Floriana A. Carmeci, and Silvana Miceli (2015). The Decision Making Tendency Inventory: A new measure to assess maximizing, satisficing, and minimizing. Personality and Individual Differences , 85: 111–116.  ↩︎

Cotra, Ajeya (2017). Introduction to Effective Altruism .  ↩︎

Foot, Philippa (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Oxford Review , 5: 5–15; Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1976). Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem, The Monist , 59: 204–17; Greene, Joshua D., R. Brian Sommerville, Leigh E. Nystrom, John M. Darley, and Jonathan D. Cohen (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science , 293(5537): 2105–2108.  ↩︎

Everett, Jim AC, Nadira S. Faber, Julian Savulescu, and Molly J. Crockett (2018). The costs of being consequentialist: Social inference from instrumental harm and impartial beneficence. Journal of experimental social psychology , 79: 200–216.  ↩︎

Mill, John Stuart (1838). Bentham, in John M. Robson (ed.) Collected works (vol. X), Toronto: Toronto University Press: pp. 75–116; Sidgwick, Henry (1907/1981). The Method of Ethics , 7th edition. Indianapolis: Hackett; Crisp, Roger (1992). Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue. The Philosophical Quarterly , 42(167): 139–160; Hooker, Brad (2002). Ideal code, real world: A rule-consequentialist theory of morality . Oxford University Press; Ord, Toby (2009). Beyond Action: Applying consequentialism to decision making and motivation. D. Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford.  ↩︎

Mill, John Stuart (1861/1992). Utilitarianism , In On Liberty and Utilitarianism , Knopf: Everyman’s Library, Volume 81.; Railton, Peter (1984). Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs , 13: 134–171.  ↩︎

• Skip to main content
• Skip to secondary menu
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

A Plus Topper

Improve your Grades

Utilitarianism Essay | Essay on Utilitarianism for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Utilitarianism Essay:  Utilitarianism is one of the most influential theories of morality. It mainly advocates actions that lead to happiness and avoids any form of negativity. The purpose of mortality is to make lives better. It is the greatest principle of happiness. It determines right from wrong. It mainly focuses on the outcomes.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Utilitarianism for Students and Kids in English

We are providing the students with essay samples, of a long essay of 500 words in English and a short essay of 150 words in English for reference.

Long Essay on Utilitarianism 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Utilitarianism is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Utilitarianism usually uses actions that maximize happiness and well-being of an individual. It is a version of consequentialism, which means that the consequences of any actions are either right or wrong. It considers all the interests of humans in an equal manner.

With utilitarianism, an action seems to be morally right or wrong. The concept of utilitarianism was first looked into keenly by Jeremy Bentham. He was an English philosopher, and he believed that happiness is the only true good, and that is the only truth that exists. Bentham’s form of utilitarianism is known as classic utilitarianism in today’s date. According to Bentham, the morally right action had the most net happiness for everyone.

To determine, which action was morally correct, a person had to add up all units of happiness and had to subtract all kinds of sadness that the action would create. Modern utilitarianism has two forms they are, act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism. Classic utilitarianism created by Bentham leads to the act-utilitarianism. The concept of act-utilitarianism means, each time an action is decided upon, that particular event is completely different than any other actions that are needed to be calculated.

Rule-utilitarianism, on the other hand, is the morally correct action that one follows as a general rule. Following these rules brings great happiness. The ultimate goal of utilitarianism, be it act-utilitarianism, or rule-utilitarianism, is to bring happiness. It is a moral theory which denotes that one should aim to maximize utility whenever possible.

Utilitarianism is about people who care about everyone capable of suffering and capable of making their lives better by improving it. It also refers to those actions that maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This theory is based on the elucidation that a consequence of an action justifies the moral acceptability of means to reach an end, and the results of the action outweigh any other considerations. Utilitarianism believes that sacrificing one man to save a community is the right choice because the happiness of a whole bunch of people is being maximized.

Utilitarianism does not take into account personal relationships. It is the duty of every person following utilitarianism to help people without thinking about the consequences. Utilitarianism is based on three principles which are as follows, happiness or pleasure is the only thing that holds intrinsic value, all actions that promote happiness are correct, and the actions that do are not right. Everyone’s happiness counts equally.

Utilitarianism in socio-political construct aims for the betterment of the society as a whole. It is a reason-based approach that determines the right and the wrong. It also has certain limitations based on the consequences of the situation. In the world of business and commerce, utilitarianism holds the most ethical choice that a person will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. If a limitation is applied to utilitarianism, it tends to create a black and white construct of mortality. There are no shades of grey in utilitarianism. It is either black or white.

Short Essay on Utilitarianism 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Utilitarianism is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Utilitarianism is a traditional and ethical philosophy that is associated with Jeremy Bentham and his fellow mate John Mill. Both were British philosophers, economists and political thinkers. The concept of utilitarianism promotes that an action is right if it leads to happiness.

A utilitarian philosophy aims at making society better. It says that if an action is right, it results in happiness and would lead to the betterment of a group or a society. Utilitarianism also has its types. Apart from act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism, there is a concept known as negative utilitarianism. R.N Smart introduced it. This concept seeks the quickest and the least painful method of killing the existence of humanity.

People who follow utilitarianism are known as utilitarians. The utilitarians believe that the purpose of mortality is to make life better by increasing the number of good things in the world like pleasure and happiness and reducing the bad things in the world like pain and unhappiness. This concept rejects any kinds of moral codes like taboos and commands based on different traditions or any order given by any leader.

10 Lines on Utilitarianism in English

• Utilitarianism is one of the most persuasive approaches to normative ethics.
• Bentham used science to explain human behaviour based on utilitarianism.
• In the spirit of utilitarianism, Bentham requested to deposit his body after death.
• As per Bentham’s request, his body was laid out for public dissection.
• It is considered to be the most influential and effective theory of modern times.
• Utilitarianism is derived from the term “utility”.
• Utility in this context of utilitarianism means happiness or pleasure and not useful.
• Bentham’s commitment to equality was radical
• One of the limitations of utilitarianism is, the outcome of the consequences is not known.
• It is the only moral framework that can define military force or war.

FAQ’s on Utilitarianism Essay

Question 1.  What is the main theme of utilitarianism?

Answer:  The main theme of utilitarianism is, it morally promotes everyone’s values with equal treatment to everyone, centring around happiness.

Question 2. Name one drawback of utilitarianism.

Answer: It fails to take into consideration the concept of justice since its main focus is on happiness and pleasure of the individual, no matter what be the outcome of a situation.

Question 3. Does utilitarianism threaten individual rights?

Answer: It does threaten individual rights to some extent. It weakens the notion of individual rights, making it useless in its context. It talks about sacrifice for the sake of others’ happiness.

• Picture Dictionary
• English Speech
• English Slogans
• English Letter Writing
• English Essay Writing
• English Textbook Answers
• Types of Certificates
• ICSE Solutions
• Selina ICSE Solutions
• ML Aggarwal Solutions
• HSSLive Plus One
• HSSLive Plus Two
• Kerala SSLC
• Distance Education

Browse Content

Who do we answer to, how does a good life feel, what is the role of suffering in a good life, what is a life worth living, explore all resources, featured content.

Judaism Is About Love

By Rabbi Shai Held

Willie Jennings on Righteous Indignation

By Life Worth Living Team

Delores Williams on the Danger of Glorified Suffering

Life Worth Living is an initiative of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School .

A Life Shaped by Utilitarianism

By Julia Wise

Julia Wise is Community Liaison for the Centre for Effective Altruism.

Julia Wise of the Center for Effective Altruism lectures on how her own life was shaped by utilitarianism and a commitment to generosity and sharing wealth.

Life Worth Living Newsletter Signup

Sign up for updates and access the entire library of previous Life Worth Living downloads.

Keep browsing

By Rabbi Shai Held with Miroslav Volf

By Matthew Croasmun

A Life Worth Living (The University of Hong Kong)

By Daniel Chua

Nietzsche on the Discipline of Suffering

Peter Singer on Giving

Join the LWL Community

We’ll send you a monthly email with our latest content.

Branded Newsletter Sign Up

We’ll send you a weekly email with our latest content.

Examples of Utilitarianism in Real Life

Utilitarianism is a concept of philosophy and ethical theories that supports actions of happiness and well-being actions for an individual while rejecting all the thoughts and actions that create a state of unhappiness. It is considered to be one of the most important and well known moral theories applicable in real life. The concept of utilitarianism works on the basis of various other forms of consequentialism and relies on the notion that an action can be labelled as a right choice or wrong choice on the basis of the effect of the action. The belief of utilitarianism is to make life better by encouraging the good deeds that bring pleasure, joy, and happiness to a person’s life and suppressing the actions that make an individual unhappy or stressed. Utilitarians tend to discourage or reject the pre-decided customs and moral codes created by society, leaders, and supernatural beings and consider an action to be true or justifiable if the act leads to a positive contribution to an individual’s life or the nature. Jeremy Bentham who was an English philosopher and political radical and John Stuart Mill who was an English philosopher, political economist, Member of Parliament and civil servant are considered to be two of the most important utilitarians and social reformers to date. The theories and ideologies introduced by them were applicable to most of the economic, political, and social aspects of society. In the past, the notion of utilitarianism was highly criticized and opposed by a number of people; however, in the current scenario, the theory has gained huge support from the people and knowledgeable philosophers. The only discrepancy in the idea of utilitarianism is that the determination of whether or not the moral theory is correct is a complicated process as the understanding of the theory varies from person to person. This creates multiple versions of the theory. The disagreement between the believers of different theories of utilitarianism prohibits the declaration and establishment of a unified and fundamental theory of utilitarianism for the common people. In simple words, utilitarianism can be defined as the concept that describes an action made by an individual in any situation as good or bad by observing the type of result produced upon the implementation of the choice.

Types of Utilitarianism

Primarily the theory of utilitarianism can be broadly classified into two categories, namely, act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. The definition, key differences between the two types of utilitarianism, advantages, disadvantage, and application of both types of utilitarianism are discussed in the following sections:

Act Utilitarianism

Act utilitarianism primarily focuses on the effects of the actions of an individual. Act utilitarianism aims at maximizing the overall utility by enhancing the utility of every action made by an individual. If each action performed by an individual has the potential to bring out the maximum possible utility than any other possible choice of action, then it can be said that the utility is currently at its peak or highest possible level or value. If a person chooses to make a decision that has produced less utility than the utility that could have been achieved if any other decision was made in place of the current decision, then the total utility of the actions turns out to be less than the ideal utility value. The notion of act utilitarianism implies that the principle of utilitarianism should be applied to the acts individually and not to the types of actions. Act utilitarianism condemns the traditional moralities that tell ‘thou shall not do x’, where x is any form of action or deed such as kill, steal, lie, hit, etc. Instead, act utilitarianism tends to establish a better version of the morality code by assigning an exception to the rules or traditional theories such that the original theory gets modified to ‘thou shall not do x except in a, b, or c circumstance, where x is the deed and a, b, or c are the specific circumstances. For instance, one must not kill anyone except in case of self-defence or as an act of punishment. The concept of act utilitarianism helps a person open up his/her viewpoint and improve his/her critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. In simple words, the believers of act utilitarianism or the utilitarians oppose the rigid rule-based traditional morality systems and tend to categorise the list of actions as right or wrong by observing each of them individually and considering all the aspects of the current situation on the decision-maker. Act utilitarians encourage the individuals to discard or deny a pre-existing moral code or rule in case better can be done by making an alternative choice in a particular condition or situation. The righteousness of a decision in the case of act utilitarianism basically depends on the basis of the amount of well being of the people involved or affected by the decision. The only difficulty that tends to disrupt the application of act utilitarianism in real life is the lacking ability of the people to judge or classify the critical aspects of the scenario. This leads to the plausibility of a wrong decision to be interpreted as right or the best of the available decisions. To solve this problem, Jeremy Bentham who was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer came up with the notion of a model called a hedonic calculus that simplifies the process of critical decision making. He is also known as the father of modern utilitarianism. The hedonic calculus primarily lists the factors that can or should be used to determine the amounts of pleasure, joy, pain, suffering, and the state of happiness or unhappiness caused by the implementation of a decision in a particular condition. This listing of the factors helps the individual to categorise the choices well and attempt to make the decision that would lead to the most favourable result for the living or the non-living things involved in the situation.

Rule Utilitarianism

Rule utilitarianism focuses on the result caused by the implementation of different types of actions of an individual.

Examples of Utilitarianism

1. Two patients suffering from a similar kind of mis…

To understand the concept of utilitarianism in real life, consider a scenario in which there are two patients suffering from a disease and you have sufficient medicine to cure the disease or relieve the pain of one of the patients only. In such a case, the decision making becomes critical if you stick to the rigid traditional moral code. Here, the traditional theories dictate distributing the medicine to both the patients in half, while the utilitarianism theory suggests the person judge which of the patients is in critical pain or which of the patients has the more tolerable medical condition and give the medicine to the person who needs it the most. By doing so, one can easily observe that the potential to do good improves if you make use of the utilitarianism theory of philosophy or morality rather than the traditional morality codes. To be specific, here the decision made on the basis of utilitarianism mainly relies on the concept of act utilitarianism. The only disadvantage to choosing act utilitarianism, in this case, is the difficulty to judge the intensity of the discomfort of the patients.

Related Posts

Types of Gaslighting

8 Hypothesis Testing Examples in Real Life

Thurstone’s Multiple Factor Theory (P.M.A.) Explained

Psychology: Definition, Types, Perspectives

13 Examples Of Operant Conditioning in Everyday Life

7 Real Life Examples Of Deontology

Add comment cancel reply.

Utilitarianism Theory Essay

Utilitarianism is an ethical movement that began in 18th century. It dictates that the best course of action is the one that benefits majority. Here, you will discover an essay about utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism theory argues that the consequence of an action determines whether that particular action is morally right or wrong. Philosophers behind this theory include Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, R.M. Hare and Peter Singer. All these philosophers evaluate morality of actions depending on overall happiness or well-being. Thus, they see utilitarianism as a consequentialist ethic.

Consequentialist ethics holds that in determining whether an act, policy, rule or motive is morally right, we should check whether it has good consequences for all affected persons. Rather than asking if an action has good consequences for a person, we should just inquire whether that action adds to the person’s happiness.

Therefore, utilitarianism is an ethical theory that centers on happiness, not just the happiness of one person, but happiness of many people. Thus, the greatest happiness principle is synonymous with the principle of utility. The principle of greatest happiness states that a person should do things that will have the most happiness for all involved persons.

Critics of utilitarian ethics argue that because utilitarianism emphasizes on results, utilitarian theorists should agree that the theory of ethical relativism solves the problem of relativism. These critics claim that since utilitarian theorists argue that morality of an action depends on what the product of the action will take to all affected persons, then almost every action is moral. That is to say, utilitarianism is a consequentialistic ethic and thus, we cannot know whether an action is immoral until we see its bad consequences.

Given that, utilitarian ethics in some ways holds morality of an action hostage to the result, morality of the action appears relative. However, we refute ethical relativism since utilitarian ethics is a type of universalism, given its grounds in trust in universal human nature. Utilitarian theorists say that all people have altruistic and egoistic elements, and all people seek to evade pain and augment pleasure. Then, instead of ethical relativism, they support a liberal ethics that acknowledges there are universal principles and values.

The utilitarian perspective that ethics is more inclined to our feelings and not our rationality may seem to give evidence that utilitarianism is a type of relativism. Obviously, people have different outlooks about different matters. However, description of ethics may not always be from this perspective. Think about a cruel act such as premeditated murder.

How comes that this act immoral? Is it due to societal, divine, or natural laws? The truth is that human beings cannot make the moral judgment that premeditated murder is immoral until they experience negative sentiments about such acts. If there are human beings who do not get negative sentiments after reflecting on the idea of premeditated murder, or other monstrous acts, it is because those persons have something wrong with them and thus, cannot feel others pain.

Desensitization is the contemporary psychological word that describes why some people may not have feeling for the pain of others. People become desensitized making them not feel others pain. This psychological thought matches perfectly well with the utilitarian idea of sentience. However, human nature is universal and a universal ethics rests upon nothing more than human sentiments.

At the center of the utilitarian argument that shifts from the concern we physically have for our personal feelings of pain and pleasure, to others feelings of pain and pleasure, is the belief that this is the nature of human beings. When we hear about calamities happening to others, we may find ourselves flinching or grimacing. However, to go from a claim about our human nature to a moral claim that we ought to do this, and it is correct that we do this, and wrong when we fail to do this, includes an extra step in the argument.

The crucial step is to ask ourselves whether there is actually a difference between our pains and joys and other peoples’ pains and joys. This, for instance, is a problem to any racist. If dissimilar races experience equal pleasures and pains, then how come one race sees itself as superior to another race? If there is actually no difference between our pains and pleasures with others pains and pleasures, then we ought to, just due to consistency, view their suffering as just as significant as ours.

This is the heart of the justification of the theory of utility; we should do what will have the best outcomes for all persons involved, not only for ourselves, since there actually is no significant difference involving our welfare and other people’s welfare.

It is clear that equality is a main concept involved in this reasoning. A different way to portray the central utilitarian concept is just to say humans are equal; your pain or happiness is equal to another person’s anguish or happiness. However, another person’s happiness, well-being, suffering, pleasure and pain are not more crucial than yours. Hence, considering ethics along utilitarian line takes us from egoism through altruism to equality.

Other critics of utilitarianism argue that it is difficult and impossible to apply its principles. Those that hold that it is difficult to apply utilitarian principles argue that calculating the outcomes for all persons is impractical due to uncertainty and the big number involved. The truth, however, is that utilitarianism offers a clear way of determining whether an action is moral or not, and this does not involve calculations.

As mentioned earlier, a morally right action should have pleasurable consequences. Therefore, a person who says that it is difficult to apply this theory should support his/her claims with examples of actions that produce pleasurable outcomes, but are wrong. Therefore, the argument that it is difficult to calculate what is right does not hold any water, since it has no harm to the principle of utility. Rather, this is a problem of the human condition.

Other critics that oppose the application of utilitarian principles argue that it is not possible to gauge or quantify happiness and there is no defined method of weighing happiness against suffering. However, the truth is that happiness is measurable and comparable through words like happier and happiest. If it were not measurable, then these words would have little meaning.

In conclusion, the theory of utilitarianism is sound, logical and consistent. Utilitarian ethics follow the law of greatest happiness. According to this law, human beings seek to decrease suffering and maximize happiness. Hence, an action that is correct morally must lead to the greatest possible pleasure. This also implies that actions that cause pain on human beings are morally wrong. As seen in the arguments above, this theory is beyond reproach, as it caters for all possible objections.

• Principles of Utilitarianism
• Machiavelli and a Notion of Virtue as an Innovation
• A Critique of Utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism Critique From Kantian Perspective
• Moral Relativism and Moral Universalism
• Ethics in Philosophy: Discussing Theories, Evaluating Key Concepts. In Search for the Truth
• Ethics is not Based on Religion
• Euthyphro: Concept of Holiness and Piety
• Humanity Theories: Utilitarianism
• Famine, Affluence, and Morality
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, December 19). Utilitarianism Theory Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utilitarianism-theory/

"Utilitarianism Theory Essay." IvyPanda , 19 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/utilitarianism-theory/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Utilitarianism Theory Essay'. 19 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Utilitarianism Theory Essay." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utilitarianism-theory/.

1. IvyPanda . "Utilitarianism Theory Essay." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utilitarianism-theory/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Utilitarianism Theory Essay." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/utilitarianism-theory/.

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

• Basic site functions
• Ensuring secure, safe transactions
• Secure account login
• Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
• Remembering privacy and security settings
• Analyzing site traffic and usage
• Personalized search, content, and recommendations
• Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

• Remembering general and regional preferences
• Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Utilitarianism — Utilitarianism Theory: A Critical Evaluation

Utilitarianism Theory: a Critical Evaluation

• Categories: Utilitarianism

About this sample

Words: 710 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 710 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, overview of utilitarianism theory, utilitarianism in ethics, utilitarianism in economics, criticisms and challenges to utilitarianism, case study: applying utilitarianism theory.

• Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
• Mill, J. S. (1861). Utilitarianism.
• Sen, A. (1999). The Possibility of Social Choice. The American Economic Review, 89(3), 349–378.
• Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.
• MacAskill, W. (2019). Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. Penguin.

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Philosophy

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1013 words

3 pages / 1419 words

2 pages / 1122 words

3 pages / 1226 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Utilitarianism

Everyday, people make decisions on what they believe is the best choice that will produce the best outcome. However, too many people do not image of the consequences nor do they think about the principles of morals when carrying [...]

Utilitarianism is a prominent ethical theory that has influenced moral philosophy for centuries. In this essay, we will explore the definition and history of utilitarianism, examining its association with renowned philosophers [...]

Consequentialism is an ethical theory based on whether or not a decision made or an act carried out is deemed right or wrong based on the outcome has a positive end result. Utilitarianism and Hedonism are types of [...]

Moral philosophy has long been a subject of profound debate and contemplation, with various ethical theories offering distinct perspectives on how we should make moral decisions. Two prominent ethical frameworks, utilitarianism [...]

The dilemma of whether or not the Death Penalty is ethical is major problem facing society today. The death penalty is given to those who commit crimes deemed by society and government as deserving the infliction of death with [...]

In the 1800s the industrial revolution caused many people to reconsider the laws that were introduced to society. One of the people who wanted change was an English Philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. His views on the law came [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

A philosopher answers everyday moral dilemmas in a time of coronavirus

Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University

Disclosure statement

Lee McIntyre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Boston University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

View all partners

Like a lot of people, we here at The Conversation are facing ethical decisions about our daily life as a result of the coronavirus. Here ethicist Lee McIntyre answers some of our editors’ queries. If you have a question you’d like a philosopher to answer, send it to us at [email protected]

I’m 65 years old. My son, who is 32, has offered to pick up the groceries. But he has asthma. I’m in a quandary as to who should go?

One of the leading ethical theories is “ utilitarianism ,” which says that moral decisions and actions should be made on the basis of their consequences.

Although this idea stretches back to antiquity, it was 19th-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who articulated the most developed form of this theory, arguing that ethical judgments were a matter of assessing “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

In balancing risk, you are anticipating likely consequences, which is a very utilitarian thing to do. But, as an ethicist, I would urge you to be careful.

Please consider whether you have all of the relevant information. It has now been shown that although at a much lower risk, younger people too can become dangerously sick with COVID-19. And with asthma as an underlying condition , that raises the stakes for your son.

You must also take into account your own risk profile: age, underlying health and other factors.

But, according to the utilitarian, you’ve still got to deal with another issue. Your son may be younger than you, but that means he’s also got many more life years to enjoy. According to utilitarian theory , if something were to happen to him, it would be a greater tragedy than if it happened to you, because he has more overall “utility” at stake.

Perhaps you could hire Instacart and have someone else’s son or daughter, presumably without asthma, deliver your groceries? But here is where it gets tricky. According to the utilitarian , you cannot prefer your own or your son’s happiness over that of a stranger.

It’s all about the “greatest good” for all concerned. If you think the ethical thing is to maximize happiness, then it shouldn’t matter whose happiness we are talking about.

Utilitarianism offers a method for thinking through this problem, but not an answer. You’ll have to think through each outcome – taking everyone’s happiness, health, age and risk into consideration.

I have a renter in my house who isn’t obeying social distancing rules and goes out all the time. What should I do?

As the renter lives in the same house you do, his or her behavior is endangering your health, which warrants some action.

Ethical egoism – which says that the ethical thing is that which brings about the greatest happiness for oneself – is a relevant ethical theory in this situation. You might think that your renter is an egoist, because he or she is presumably only concerned with his or her own welfare.

But that might open the door for you to claim that you are an egoist too. If you believe that it’s ethical for someone to care only about himself or herself, then perhaps you are justified in evicting the renter. But first you might want to check why he or she is going out. Perhaps it’s to take care of someone else.

So, first I’d have a talk with the renter and point out that – in a communal environment, especially in times of a public health crisis – everyone’s actions affect everyone else.

If that doesn’t work, you might guiltlessly embrace egoism as your own moral philosophy and say to the renter “if you don’t stop endangering my health, there will be consequences … for you.”

I don’t have a car and I have flu-like symptoms. Should I take a cab or Uber to go to the hospital?

Absolutely not, unless you plan to tell the driver in advance what you are doing. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the guiding principle behind ethical behavior was to follow the “ categorical imperative .” This says that everyone should act as if their behavior could form the basis for a universal law of human conduct.

So just ask yourself: What would happen if everyone who likely had COVID-19 just thought of themselves and took a cab or Uber? The disease would likely spread, which would be disastrous for many people beyond just you. The utilitarian too would agree.

A better course of action might be to call the hospital and ask for their help in arranging how to get there. If that fails, you could always call an ambulance. You might balk at the expense, but the alternative is to pass that expense, in the form of a life threatening illness, on to others – without their consent. And according to Kant, that is not an ethical thing to do.

[ You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend .]

• Utilitarianism
• Coronavirus
• John Stuart Mill
• Immanuel Kant
• Jeremy Bentham
• Ethical question
• Everyday ethics

Research Fellow Virology

Integrated Management of Invasive Pampas Grass for Enhanced Land Rehabilitation

Economics Editor

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services)