Utilitarianism: The Purpose Of Morality

Utilitarian’s believe that the purpose of morality is to make life better by increasing the amount of good things in the world and decreasing the amount of bad things. Suppose the class has a test due and some of the students are debating whether or not they should cheat. The utilitarian would need to know many specifics about the test whether or not what the chances are of getting caught cheating, what grade they probably would get if you didn’t cheat, and what grade you’d probably get if you did cheat, in the short and long term. Only then would the utilitarian be able to tell whether or not you should cheat on the exam. On the one hand, if it turns out that they never need to use the material later on, that they would fail if they didn’t
Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. It all depends upon the consequences of that particular act of cheating. One of them is “Rule Utilitarianism”, an action is right if it confirms to a rule when adopted, and then produces more overall happiness. The other kind of utilitarianism is called “Act Utilitarianism,” an action is right if it produces overall happiness in a given situation. To an extent it’s a pretty simple ethical theory, it can be very complex because it needs to take into account many features of the action being evaluated. The two theories can be identified as intrinsically valuable or for shorter terms “for its own sake” it won't bring happiness or benefit you at the end. The general rule that the student would be followed if they did cheat then consider whether this rule is generally followed, it would maximize happiness. If people cheated on exams regularly, exams would lose their function as tools for students to actually
In many situations abortion would be considered a touchy subject on moral. For instance, in cases of rape if a woman is raped and gets pregnant, is she expected to keep the baby? Why would the woman, if she could get an abortion and not have to live with the memory, and possibly increase her happiness. There are many other examples where abortion would prove to make the individual happier. In many cases of teen pregnancy abortion is almost always one of the options considered, a pregnancy would drastically change the teen’s future, if an abortion could change that outcome. “Act Utilitarianism” is about the happiness of the individual, so if the happiness will be increased by the abortion one would assume that they would agree with the moral standing of abortion. There is still many reasons to disagree about the morality of abortion from a Utilitarianism stand point, women who receive necessary medical abortions that are not going to cause anyone happiness, in fact the abortions that are medically necessary would cause people unhappiness. Mothers with multiple fetuses that have complications and have to end one of the baby’s lives to either save the other baby or the life of the mother herself. “Rule Utilitarianism” is the matter of moral stand points of weather abortion is considered good or bad. This is entirely objective, while some