How Does Mill Define Happiness

Every day we are faced with certain situations that challenge us with how to act in an ethical manner. It can be human nature to feel unsure or conflicted with the correct moral choice. Some can say that one should know how to handle such dilemmas and others may say that there should be a reference of some sort to help guide through such conflicts. Sometimes we know the answers and sometimes we are unsure of how to handle certain situations. Most times we go through life wondering what we should do. As I become further educated on the different theories of ethics, I believe there are answers that are available in guiding one through an ethical dilemma and or judgment. I will discuss Vincent Ruggiero’s three basic criteria, Robert Kegan’s order of consciousness, the three schools of ethics and the correlation between all three.

What is really ethical? What is right? What is wrong? What are the factors involved in making the distinction between killing and letting die? What is the difference between killing one to save five and leaving one to die while rescuing five? Philippa Foot created a thought experiment that presents two cases known as Rescue I and Rescue II. In these cases, one must create a dissimilarity between doing and allowing. They must ask themselves what would be the moral thing to do. Philosophers have tried to explain the concept of morals and ethics and create systems to relate the two. John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant are both two of these kind of philosophers. They express conditions on morality which are then applied to an ethical position. These conditions both explained what they believed is right and wrong and who benefits from what, but they are very different. Mill and Kant’s ethical positions foil one another and are very necessary when being applied to Foot’s thought experiment. This begs the question if you will do things to save the greatest number, or if you would do things strictly because it feels right. In Rescue I and Rescue II, Mill would provide happiness for the 5 individuals, while Kant would give life to whomever needed it simply because of his “good will.”

When we are presented with a situation and we want to decide whether an act we are about to perform is right or wrong Kant would suggest to look at the maxims of the act itself and not just the amount of misery or happiness the act is most likely to produce. “We just have to check that the act we have in mind will not use anyone as mere means, and, if possible that it will treat other persons as ends in themselves” (O’Neil, 1985). Kant would want to help these men and women seek help for their drug addiction. Kant would treat

Using the philosophical approaches of Kant's Deontology and Mill's Utilitarianism, I will present the ethical parameters of Dr. Luthan's dilemmas and how

Another scenario, suppose a doctor sees the test data showing that the person has a disease that is curable and have survive rate of greater than fifty percent. What will the doctor do? A utilitarian doctor will say telling the truth there will be a great deal of pleasure to all. The person will be happy, their family will be happy, the doctor will be happy in informing the ill person that there is treatment to alter his/her condition. So the ethical solution will be to tell the truth, which is different from the first scenario. The Kantian doctor would make the same decision as the decision he made in the first scenario, no matter how the outcome changes.

Immanuel Kant refers to happiness as contentment (Kant, ) whereas John Stuart Mill refers to it as the pursuit of pleasure and the absence of pain (Mill, p.7). Kant does not base his ethics on happiness. Instead, he argues that morality is based on our duty as a human (Kant, ). To do what is right for Kant is to do what is instinctually moral without giving thought to the overall happiness. On the other hand, Mill does in fact use happiness as the bases for his ethics. He proposes that actions are right if they promote overall happiness and wrong if they promote the opposite of happiness (Mill, ). In this paper, it will be argued that Mill 's views on happiness are more reasonable than those of Kant 's because happiness should be the base for ethics.

The issues of morality are most clearly expressed through examples of different methods of analyzing a situation. The case of Holmes, an officer in charge of a sinking ship, shows the striking differences between philosopher Immanuel Kant’s beliefs and those of the Utilitarians. After Holmes’ ship sinks, there are twenty passengers in a lifeboat that is only meant to hold fourteen people. There was no time to send out a signal for help before the ship sank, so no rescue is guaranteed and the nearest land is fifteen hundred miles away. Holmes decides to force the wounded passengers and those wearing life jackets off of the lifeboat and make his way to shore without them. This action

Explain in your own words the logic of Mill’s argument, and critically discuss whether happiness should be the criterion of morality.

Mill and Aristotle definitions of happiness are vastly different between the two. For Aristotle he goes into discuss three different parts. He goes into discuss the term pleasure. The next was to attempt to claim honor and the very last and to most the most important the way of contemplation or well rationality. Real happiness to Aristotle and of course the kind that leads to moral goods is through contemplation.

Would you put your own life at risk to save someone else? What if they had a low chance of survival, and it was likely that the both of you would die? Many people would say yes. Ultimately, one has to look at this situation through the lense of an ethics approach, and which one is best for the situation. The short story “Bread” by Margaret Atwood describes different ethical dilemmas in which the reader is given different scenarios in which they must make a choice that can only come by deciding what their ethics are. Five different ethical approaches are described in the article “A Framework for Thinking Ethically”, which describes the meaning of ethics and the different viewpoints surrounding the topic. Out of these different approaches highlighted in “A Framework for Thinking Ethically”, the utilitarian approach along with the virtue approach would be best for solving the dilemmas presented in “Bread”.

The work of Immanuel Kant focuses on the idea that of everything in the world it is only good will that can be taken as “good without qualification” (Kant, 393). Unlike qualities or talents, which can be used both for good and for bad, good will is considered by Kant to be unequivocally good. Therefore, Kant’s principles require an individual to make decisions only based rationally upon the principles, or maxim, behind that decision, without consideration of the consequences that that action will bring about. Here, I will be evaluating a particular scenario and evaluating the morally right decision based solely on the principles of Kant. According to Kant, the morally right act must come from a decision taken by an individual because it is one’s duty, as opposed to a decision that is performed merely in accordance with duty. The significance there is that an act cannot be morally right in and of itself if it is not performed for the right reason. As a result, it is particularly important to evaluate the duties at play in this scenario as opposed to the outside motivating forces and inclinations that the individual may have in the situation. The particular circumstance that I will analyze concerns an individual who is sheltering Anne Frank and her family. The individual is one day confronted by the Gestapo who demand to know if that individual is sheltering Jews, to which the individual must decide whether to lie and protect the Frank family or to tell the truth and

Is there really one definition for what it means to be truly happy? A simple joy such as a piece of candy may bring happiness to one; whereas something much larger might be the determining factor for another’s happiness. The definition of happiness is one of the most debated questions among many different philosophers and people through out the ages. Aristotle and John Stuart Mill are two philosophers who had similar ideas regarding the definition of happiness, but argued different theories on what constitutes happiness and what is required to be truly happy.

Mill’s pleasure principle was disputed by both philosophers and theologians because of its apparent lack of association to a code of morality. To this, Mill contended that there can

Kant had a different ethical system which was based on reason. According to Kant reason was the fundamental authority in determining morality. All humans possess the ability to reason, and out of this ability comes two basic commands: the hypothetical imperative and the categorical imperative. In focusing on the categorical imperative, in this essay I will reveal the underlying relationship between reason and duty.

In this essay I have chosen to compare two opposing theories, Immanuel Kant 's absolutist deontological ethics and Joseph Fletchers relativist situation ethics. The deontological ethics focuses on actions made according to duty and the categorical imperative - which shows how acts are intrinsically good or bad. The situation ethics state that no act is intrinsically good or bad, and that actions should b made according to love. From this perspective it looks as thought Kant 's views were less personal than Fletcher 's, although in actuality both focus on the best outcome for humans.