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Chapter Five: Ethics as Efficiency: Making Everyone Better
Off
Learning Objectives of Chapter Five
1. Recall the Guidant story and explain how ethics were implicated.
3. Distinguish between forms of utilitarianism.
5. Describe the differences between act and rule-consequentialism.
SUMMARY: Chapter Five breaks down the key concepts that are a part of
consequentialist ethics. The spectrum of utilitarianism is described and critiqued and its
features explained. This chapter also explains the consequentialist idea of efficiency and
the Pareto Criterion.
unlike virtue-ethical reasoning, which makes reference to the conventional or
essential meaning of roles and their responsibilities.
Differing views:
The norms of the role of a doctor is of instrumental moral importance in
Guidant preventing death and improving health.
Consequentialist Ethics
There are many forms of consequentialism, but they share the moral premise that
whether an action is right depends only on the consequences that the action will
produce. An action is morally right if it leads to the best consequences.
One ought to do X, if and only if X has the best consequences.
But we cannot fully predict what the consequences of actions will be, which leads to
two kinds of rightness:
Objective action that in fact has the best consequences
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Utilitarianism
What is a good consequence? Utilitarianism asserts that the best consequences are
those that bring about the most happiness for as many people as possible.
Three Key Features:
Morality is focused on consequences.
-being or happiness that it
generates.
o Welfarism: is a component of utilitarianism. All that matters for
-off the individuals
are.
Benefits of Utilitarianism:
Morality is not based on social convention or religious belief.
Utilitarianism offers a unified theory that promises to answer all ethical
problems in principle.
Utilitarianism requires efficiency
allocate it. But can happiness be compared interpersonally? It presupposes that we
-being more than it decreases
unt for qualitative differences in kinds of happiness.
Pareto criterion: a state of affairs X is better than Y if and only if nobody is worse
off in X than in Y, and at least one person is better off in X than in Y.
Pareto superiority or Pareto dominance. (i.e. X is Pareto-
Pros:
o Avoids sacrificing some people for the greater good
o
Cons:
o make as many
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Act-And-Rule Consequentialism
Act consequentialism: situates moral value in the consequences of a specific act.
Rule consequentialism: locates moral value in the moral consequences of following
Rule utilitarianism: we should act in such a way that, if everyone acted that