DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES FROM DECISIONS TAKEN 1
Different Perspectives from Decisions Taken
Camila Puentes
April 27, 2020
State College of Florida: Bradenton Campus
Author Note
This paper was prepared for Written Communications II (ENC 1102), taught by Professor
Bojanowski.
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES FROM DECISIONS TAKEN 2
Different perspectives from decisions taken
As time moves forward, people and their beliefs are subject to change due to multiple
reasons. Utilitarianism can be defined as “assess acts and/or character traits, practices, and
institutions solely in terms of overall net benefit. Overall net benefit is often referred to as
aggregate well-being or welfare. Aggregate welfare is calculated by counting a benefit or harm to
any one individual the same as the same size benefit or harm to any other individual, and then
adding all the benefits and harms together to reach an aggregate sum” (Hooker, 2015). According
to utilitarianism, acts are evaluated considering the whole instead of individual benefit in order to
obtain an aggregate sum. ”Classic utilitarians held hedonistic act consequentialism. Act
consequentialism is the claim that an act is morally right if and only if that act maximizes the
good, that is, if and only if the total amount of good for all minus the total amount of bad for all
is greater than this net amount for any incompatible act available to the agent on that
occasion” (Sinnot-Armstrong, 2019). As such, an act is morally right if it brings the better and
maximizes the good discarding the bad sides of that act. ”This rationale is typical of
utilitarianism, a system of ethics that requires us to maximize the total happiness or well-being
resulting from our actions. Saving many lives at the cost of just one would represent a net
increase in well-being or utility, and while it would certainly be a tragic choice, utilitarians
would generally endorse it” (White, 2008, p. 13). Consequentialism can also be defined as that
“whether an act is morally right depends only on consequences (as opposed to the circumstances
or the intrinsic nature of the act or anything that happens before the act)” (Sinnot-Armstrong,
2019). It assumes that “what is best or right is whatever makes the world best in the future,
because we cannot change the past, so worrying about the past is no more useful than crying over
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES FROM DECISIONS TAKEN 3
spilled milk” (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2019). Occasionally, people would not think in the future as
much, and just take an action without thinking further. The truth is that what happened in the past
already happened, and nobody can change it. For this reason, the best and right act will always
be whatever makes and give the best for the world as a whole. Often times a moral choice is hard
to make, just like in a situation in which an individual is between the choices of killing someone
or being killed. “There are no moral rules in a death match. If you’re not willing to abandon the
constraints of morality, you’ll be the victim of someone who is” (Foy, 2012, p. 206). When
thinking about killing or surviving adding someone’s beliefs, killing might be the last thing one
could probably think to do. When in the middle of these two choices, one needs to remember that
their own life comes first, and if one not abandon the constraints of morality, somebody else
