materialism. … methodology; and the Australian materialist J.J.C. Smart did so with a metaphysical application of the principle (called “Ockham’s razor”) that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Ethics. In ethics, Smart was a defender of utilitarianism. Specifically, he defended “extreme”, or act utilitarianism, as opposed to “restricted”, or rule utilitarianism. The distinction between these two types of ethical theory is explained in his essay Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism.

The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes.

Smart goes on to explain restricted utilitarianism is a school of thinking which “regards moral rule as more than rules of thumb for short-circuiting calculations of consequences. Generally, he argues consequences are not relevant at all when we are deciding what to do in a particular case.

“A utilitarian theory which denies that the sole object of moral concern is the maximising of pleasure or happiness.

Utilitarianism, in normative ethics, a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action (or type of action) is right if it tends to promote happiness or pleasure and wrong if it tends to produce unhappiness or …

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with utilitarianism is that it fails to take into account considerations of justice. We can imagine instances where a certain course of action would produce great benefits for society, but they would be clearly unjust.

There are three principles that serve as the basic axioms of utilitarianism.

• Pleasure or Happiness Is the Only Thing That Truly Has Intrinsic Value.
• Actions Are Right Insofar as They Promote Happiness, Wrong Insofar as They Produce Unhappiness.
• Everyone’s Happiness Counts Equally.

An example of utilitarianism that shows someone making an individual “good” choice that actually benefits the entire population can be seen in Bobby’s decision to buy his sister, Sally, a car. Bobby buys Sally the car so that she can get back and forth to work.

An example of act utilitarianism is a pharmaceutical company releasing a drug that has been governmentally approved with known side effects because the drug is able to help more people than are bothered by the minor side effects.

Human rights are particularly vulnerable to challenges from both utilitarianism and cultural relativism. The promotion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number cannot justify some violation of an individual’s welfare, if that individual has a right to the benefit in question.

Utilitarianism is a tradition of ethical philosophy that is associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, two late 18th- and 19th-century British philosophers, economists, and political thinkers.

Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories. Utilitarians believe that the purpose of morality is to make life better by increasing the amount of good things (such as pleasure and happiness) in the world and decreasing the amount of bad things (such as pain and unhappiness).

List of the Cons of Utilitarianism

• We do not consider any other element besides happiness.
• It creates an unrealistic perspective for society.
• Utilitarianism can be unpredictable.
• It also relies on people making consistent decisions.
• Utilitarianism relies on multiple definitions of happiness.

When data is scarce, Kantian theory offers more precision than utilitarianism because one can generally determine if somebody is being used as a mere means, even if the impact on human happiness is ambiguous. Although utilitarianism has a larger scope than Kantianism, it is a more timely process.

The main difference between Kantianism and Utilitarianism is that Kantianism is a deontological moral theory whereas utilitarianism is a teleological moral theory. Both Kantianism and utilitarianism are ethical theories that express the ethical standard of an action.

Kant’s theory would not have been utilitarian or consequentialist even if his practical recommendations coincided with utilitarian commands: Kant’s theory of value is essentially anti-utilitarian; there is no place for rational contradiction as the source of moral imperatives in utilitarianism; Kant would reject the …

Kant is responsible for the most prominent and well-known form of deontological ethics. Kant’s moral theory is based on his view of the human being as having the unique capacity for rationality. Good will is exercised by acting according to moral duty/law.

Four broad categories of ethical theory include deontology, utilitarianism, rights, and virtues.

One thing that clearly distinguishes Kantian deontologism from divine command deontology is that Kantianism maintains that man, as a rational being, makes the moral law universal, whereas divine command maintains that God makes the moral law universal.

The basic idea, as Kant describes it in the Groundwork, is that what makes a good person good is his possession of a will that is in a certain way “determined” by, or makes its decisions on the basis of, the moral law.

Kant says that the good will is the only thing “good without limitation” (ohne Einschränkung). A good will, Kant says, often fails to achieve the good ends at which it aims. But its own proper goodness is not diminished by this failure, or even by bad results that might flow from it (contrary to its volitions).

Kant believed that the shared ability of humans to reason should be the basis of morality, and that it is the ability to reason that makes humans morally significant. He, therefore, believed that all humans should have the right to common dignity and respect.

His moral philosophy is a philosophy of freedom. Without human freedom, thought Kant, moral appraisal and moral responsibility would be impossible. Kant believes that if a person could not act otherwise, then his or her act can have no moral worth.

While Kant is a transcendental idealist–he believes the nature of objects as they are in themselves is unknowable to us–knowledge of appearances is nevertheless possible. Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us.

Kant’s philosophy has been called a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. From rationalism he takes the idea that we can have a priori knowledge of significant truths, but rejects the idea that we can have a priori metaphysical knowledge about the nature of things in themselves, God, or the soul.

While Kant famously denied that we have access to intrinsic divisions (if any) of the thing in itself that lies behind appearances or phenomena, he held that we can discover the essential categories that govern human understanding, which are the basis for any possible cognition of phenomena.

The Categories (Greek Κατηγορίαι Katēgoriai; Latin Categoriae or Praedicamenta) is a text from Aristotle’s Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are “perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions”.

According to this ontology, the four basic categories of being are (1) enduring objects (or individual substances), (2) kinds (which are instantiated by enduring objects and which more or less correspond to Aristotle’s secondary substances), (3) attributes (which characterize enduring objects but cannot be said to be …

Kant divides the mind into three main faculties: cognition, desire, and feeling. Each of these faculties is characterized first and foremost in terms of the kinds of representations they generate.