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What Is The Consequentialist Theory Of Action Theory

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INTRODUCTION
Actions are more expressive than words. We always emphasize on how people act and we always judge the right from wrong from the actions done. There is a philosophical reason behind this. The philosophy is that morals are determined by actions is called normative ethics.
If we look at the justice system of the society, we can see this pretty clearly that actions are being judged, not the intentions. Normative ethics agree to the fact that the morality is based on actions. But there are different ways of viewing it. Such as Consequentialism, this says that morality of an action should be judged by its consequences. And those moral actions are categorized as those that produce a positive outcome and immoral are those which produce …show more content…

We might be evaluating character traits instead of actions, or we might be evaluating actions in terms of the consequences. Consequentialist theories of moral evaluation have two parts. One part is an account of what is good, and the other part suggests that how this good should be approached, which underlies the property such of being right. For e.g. A very well-known example of consequentialism is Utilitarianism, which holds that the right action is the action that maximizes pleasure, the action that has the overall best consequence in terms of production of pleasure. Suppose that a doctor, Claire, has only a specific dose of medicine, that is only enough to save a life of only one person, James.
In order to save James, she would need to use the whole doze of medicine. However, there are five other people who need much smaller dozes/portions of medicine than James, in order to be saved. Claire could instead divide the medicine into five smaller dozes and save them instead of James.
Now a utilitarian would perceive the right action as the action with the best possible consequence and so Claire should use the medicine to save five rather than just …show more content…

On that evening, the nurse had 7 total care patients, and had to administer quite many medicines and provide care. In that particular evening, another nurses’ patients fell and she had to attend to her partner nurse’s patient.
After ensuring all patients were uninjured patient, giving medications and completing all assessments, she didn’t have any time left for giving evening care. And so, two patients had to go to bed without being washed. The nurse was also unable to do hourly safety checks on her patients. And, she also had to stay after hours to complete the report on two incidents. This experience affected the nurse and she felt guilty that she wasn’t able to provide care to these patients. This incident occurred three years ago and she still has not accepted another shift on that floor. This heavy workload has occurred because of the cost associated with hiring more nurses, or care aids, etc. to minimize work load. Another issue might be staffing issue on this

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