Utilitarianism Determine Morality

Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, which means that it judges the morality of an action based on the consequences that follow from it rather than on external moral duties. Philosophers who adhere to utilitarianism regard the maximisation of utility as the key determent for understanding whether an action is right or not . In this essay I will argue that the amount of utility produces by an action is not an ideal way of determining its morality. This will be done by firstly clarifying the meaning of the term utility and then examining the argument put forth by utilitarianism. A objections will then be raised pertaining to the number of people gaining utility and the intensity of utility gained. This will be done in order to see if
What I mean by the quantity of individuals gaining utility can be illustrated by the following two examples. If say for instance patient A goes to the hospital for a small operation. At the same time four other patients in the hospital are in desperate need of different organ transplants, but the hospital has no donated organs to give them. If the doctors decided to remove the healthy organs of patient A while in surgery and give them to the other four patients this would be saving four lives at the price of one. According to utilitarianism this would be the right thing to do, because the utility produced by saving the lives of four people outweighs the utility of only one person staying alive. However this comes into direct conflict with the belief that people have certain inalienable rights . Regardless of the fact that one death would save four lives we still believe that patient A has the right to his own organs and to life. Thus the question of whether or not patient A should be allowed to live cannot be reduced to a matter of maximising
We expect people to keep their promises not only because breaking them would lead to less utility, but because the promise was made at some past moment in time. The actual making of the promise seems to overrule the amount of utility produced by keeping or not keeping the promise . Even if not keeping the promise produced more utility for the promise keeper, we nevertheless regard keeping the promise as the right thing to do. The same approach counts for punishing criminals, we do not merely consider the consequences of punishing them but also the crime that was committed. Utilitarianism fails to take into account these backwards-looking reasons for why some actions are