Reading Summaries

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Course Tittle

Professor’s Name

Date

Reading Summary Ch. 5

Utilitarianism” by John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill describes utilitarianism according to the reading as a model based on the principle that actions are correct in proportion as they are expected to promote pleasure, incorrect as they have a propensity to generate the opposite of happiness. He defines happiness as pleasure and the lack of pain. Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics, which promotes actions that bring pleasure or happiness and opposes those that foster sadness or harm. John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism’s elementary principle is the maximum happiness principle in a way that an action is correct insofar as it makes the best use of overall utility, which he recognizes with happiness. In reference to the reading, when directed towards economic, social, or political decisions, a utilitarian theory would function for the betterment of society as a whole.

The doctrine which consents, as the basis of morals, the greatest happiness principle or utility asserts that actions are only right if they generate pleasure (Ogan, 2018). Mill claims that happiness can differ in quantity and quality and that happiness grounded in someone’s greater abilities ought to be weighted more heavenly than baser pleasures. In addition, Mill reasons that individuals’ attainment of objectives and ends, such as good living, ought to be reckoned as part of their pleasure. Indeed, Mill appears to assert that not just that greater pleasures are basically more valuable than lower pleasures but that they are intermittently better. The three principles that serve as the fundamental axioms of utilitarianism are that happiness or pleasure is the only thing that correctly has inherent importance, everyone’s delight counts equally, and actions are correct insofar as they stimulate pleasure, incorrect insofar as they generate unhappiness. According to utilitarianism, the purpose of morals is to make life better by raising the number of good things (such as contentment and pleasure) in the universe and reducing the number of bad things (such as pain and sadness).

Reading Summary Ch. 10

Active and Passive Euthanasia” by James Rachels

The difference between passive and active euthanasia is supposed to be crucial for medicinal morals. The notion is that it is allowable, at least in particular cases, to hold back treatment and let a patient pass away, but it is on no occasion allowable to take any direct action intended to murder the patient. This principle appears to be accepted by a number of doctors, and it is permitted in a pronouncement approved by the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association (Langsdorf, 2020). Passive euthanasia signifies purposely allowing a patient to perish by withholding synthetic life support such as a feeding tube or ventilator. In contrast, active euthanasia denotes murdering a patient in an active way, for example, injecting a longsuffering individual with a fatal dosage of a medicine. Other times referred to as “aggressive” euthanasia, James Rachels argument is that there is no ethical difference between Jones’s inaction of preventing the cousin from drowning (letting die) and Smith’s action of drowning the cousin (killing). They are both morally accountable for the cousin’s demise.

According to Rachels, if we deliberate two circumstances that are similar apart from that one entails killing, while the other entails allowing to pass away, it appears that there isn’t any ethical dissimilarity between them. The nature of this dispute entails bearing in mind two imaginary circumstances whereby there are no ethically significant dissimilarities available, but the basic difference that one is a case of letting die and another is a case of killing (Dintcho, 2020). However, in the pair of state of affairs under deliberation, this simple difference creates no ethical difference. James Rachels other argument is that the convectional principle results in decisions concerning life and death established in irrelevant settings.  

Reference

Dintcho, A. D. (2020). Should Active Euthanasia Be Morally and Legally Permissible? Sound Decisions: An Undergraduate Bioethics Journal, 5(1), 1.

Langsdorf, L. (2020). Relational Ethics: The Primacy of Experience. In Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde (pp. 123-140). Springer, Cham.

Ogan, T. V. (2018). John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism: A Critique. International Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies, 5(1), 66.