Ethics utilitarian

Both approaches share two fundamental utilitarian assumptions. First, utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethics that determines right and wrong by looking to the results of various policies. Second, they hold that ethics ought to be concerned with the overall, or aggregate, welfare. Deontological ethics (the word is derived from the Greek word for duty) rejects both of these assumptions. 

In the standard neoclassical economic theory, individuals are following a utilitarian ethical norm and are making decisions as if they are economically rational. 

The utilitarian man is a basis for decision making in economics. And it is a description that is valid in most market situations in the western societies at least. But, the utilitarian ethics is something that few other social sciences can find as rational for human decision making outside the usual market setting, as described earlier. 

The following passage describes the ethical theory of utilitarianism. 

If you have ever made a list of pros and cons to help you make a decision, you have used the utilitarian method of moral reasoning. One of the main ethical theories, utilitarianism posits that the key to deciding what makes an act morally right or wrong is its consequences. 

O ur own use of prisoners, the institutionalized retarded, and the mentally ill to test malaria treatments during World War II was generally hailed as positive, making the war everyone s war. Likewise, in the late 1940 s and early 1950 s, the testing of new polio vaccines on institutionalized mentally retarded children was considered appropriate. Utilitarianism was the ethic of the day. ... 

In ethical committees and public debates the emphasis is on the so-called extrinsic concerns the risks for human health, for animals and for the environment. Most methods of risk analysis look only at the consequences and the effects of genetic engineering within the framework of a utilitarian ethics (weighing costs and benefits). 

At its core, objectivity is supposed to be a guarantor of truth and freedom from ideology. At this most basic level of analysis, objectivity already concerns both results and methods to obtain results. Thus, we may speak of an objective result because it is accurate and/or stated in a way we consider to be free of human bias alternatively, we may speak of an objective method because it is specifically designed to avoid human bias in its application. Herein is a general problem. In evaluating a method, be it an ethical rule taken from a rule utilitarian, a statistical method taken from classical Neyman/Pearson statistics, or, indeed, some method of chemical analysis, one confronts cases where the... 

Smart, J. J. C. 1995. "Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism." In S. M. Cahn 8i J. G. Haber, eds. Twentieth Century Ethical Theory, (pp. 307-315). Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice Hall, [first published in Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956).]... 

Once impacts have been predicted, their relative significance needs to be assessed to evaluate whether the impacts may be considered acceptable. Evaluation methods can be of various types, which can be grouped into two main sets of methods those that assume a common utilitarian ethic with a single evaluation criterion and those that are based on the measurement of personal utilities, including multiple criteria. 

There is a question here, however, namely whether the greater readiness to accept risks when the activity is voluntary actually stems from such self-deception. This is claimed by the philosophical theory of the so-called ethical intellectualism and in particular the utilitarian school. For the most part these self-deceptions are possibly superficial, psychological rationalizations of the pleasure derived from free choice. 

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