utilitarism and kantianism

UTILITARIANISM AND KANTIANISM Most of our moral judgments concern particular things . People judge certain actions and certain people good or bad . There are many gradations . Acts and people may be heroic , splendid , admirable acceptable , indifferent or horrible to mention just a few moral adjectives . When people disagree about a moral judgment , they try to justify their own views . They do this by constructing an argument that appeals to moral principles

The search for a first principle of morality has other sources . One stems from the great variety of things people call

good . People say that certain actions , people and even qualities are good . What makes them all good ? What do they have in common ? The Enlightenment produced two great and competing accounts of the foundations of morality - the Utilitarianism and Kantism

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 ) coined the term utilitarianism which accepts as the foundation of morals , Utility , or the Greatest Happiness Principle , which holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness , wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness . Mill 's brief but brilliant treatise Utilitarianism is used by students of moral philosophy . Mill accepted the general position of Jeremy Bentham who used the phrase the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Mill , 1957

The most important change that Mill made in utilitarianism was to add a qualitative standard . Human beings with refined faculties are not satisfied with the pleasures of the body they seek the higher pleasures of the mind . The pleasures of the intellect , of feelings and imagination , and of the moral sentiments have a higher value than the pleasures of sensation . Although Mill had referred to these higher pleasures originally to answer the critics of utilitarianism , his concern over higher pleasures led him to criticize the very foundation of Bentham 's doctrine of utility : he said that it would be absurd that . the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone ' Once an individual has lived on a higher level , he or she can never wish to sink into a lower level of existence . This is because of the human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied (Williams , 1985 The Moral Law as the Absolute

One of the great systems of ethics was formulated by Immanuel Kant . He criticized the traditional view of mind as substance , a view that assumes the individual can make her or his self ' and mind ' direct objects of knowledge . For Kant , the mind was active it formed into a system of knowledge all materials presented by the various senses . Time and space were the forms of our sensible experience that , by means of judgment , were brought into unified and organized experience . Mind was not separate mental substance it was the organization and unity of personal human experience

According to Kant , our knowledge is based on our experiences as organized and understood by the mind . There is unity wherever there is knowledge , and knowledge entails...