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Essay: Utilitarian, Consequentialist and Virtue approaches

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  • Subject area(s): Philosophy essays
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  • Published: 17 February 2022*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 583 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 3 (approx)
  • Tags: Utilitarianism essays

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This page of the essay has 583 words.

A) Utilitarian approach

The Utilitarian approach is where a person or organisation holds the principle that the morally right course of action in any given situation is the course of action that delivers the greatest balance of benefits to harm, as long as the course of action gives the greatest amount of benefits for all those involved, it does not matter how those benefits are created, they can be through truth, lies, manipulation or coercion (Andre, 1989).

For example, Peter Singer wrote in the New York times about the covid-19 pandemic “I think the assumption… that we must do everything to reduce the number of deaths, is not really the right assumption. Because at some point we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life… And we can’t really keep everything locked down until there won’t be any more deaths.”

By apply a utilitarian approach Singer was advocating that for the good of the majority of people and the good of the economy there will come a time when releasing lockdown and the economy for the good of the people will outweigh the potential damage to society from deaths and the economy from those classified most at risk (Buck, 2020).

B) Consequentialist approach

The consequentialist approach is similar to the utilitarian approach but differs in the way it does not use a persons or organisations moral ideals, it instead looks at an issue on what would be the consequences of the action, for example if a person was going to die if they told the truth as it was morally right to tell the truth, and the consequence of telling a lie meant they would live, would it not be better to tell the lie and the person live. A consequentialist would say it is better to lie and save a life.

However, the consequentialist view can be hard to quantify as there are times when the consequences of an action may not be able to be calculated ahead of time no one can predict the future with any certainty. For certain situations, consequentialism can lead to choices that are unacceptable, even though the consequences are perhaps favourable.

An example would be if economists decided that enslaving a small percentage of people would improve the health, wealth, and lives of everyone else, although it would be morally repulsive and irreprehensible, the consequentialist view would be the means justified the ends (McCombs, 2018).

C) Virtue approach

The virtue approach is based on the person rather than action, for this reason it is more a person-centred approach as it looks more at the virtue or moral integrity of the person carrying out the action, rather than at ethical obligations and rules, or the consequences of that particular action.

Virtue not only deals with what is deemed to be correct or wrong with the actions of an individual, it provides assistance as to the sort of characteristics and behaviours the person will seek to attain.

In that way, the virtue approach is involved with the whole of a person’s life, rather than occurrences or actions.

A virtuous approach only uses four principles, an action is only right if it is an action that a virtuous person would carry out in the same circumstances. A virtuous person is a person who acts virtuously. A person acts virtuously if they “possess and live the virtues”. A virtue is a moral characteristic that a person needs to live well (BBC, 2014).

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