Utilitarian Ideology

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The maximization of pleasure and utility initially sounds marvelous for a society, but after taking a deeper look into the utilitarian ideology, we can observe that this ideology is very incomplete and unusable. The utilitarian ideology has many different facets that may give off the impression of versatility and therefore a wide range of applicability, however, it is an ideology that does not know what it wants to be. In other words, the act, rule, and most other variants of utilitarianism have crucial issues which would promote a horrible society. Consequently, utilitarianism fails as a political philosophy. One of the more popular variants of utilitarianism is act-utilitarianism. Smart states act-utilitarianism to be, “The view that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends only on the total goodness or badness of its consequences” (Smart, 9). At first sight, this ideology may seem like common sense because in our society we have laws, cultural customs, and consequences in place for people that commit morally wrong actions. …show more content…
Since ethics are not considered by utilitarianism, violence could be used in order to maximize utility. For instance, if a nation found engagement in wars lucrative, that nation would be justified to start wars because from the results of war, utility could be maximized. To take this to an extreme, if a nation could prove that it could maximize its utility by engaging in nuclear warfare and completely wiping out other countries, the utilitarian would have to approve of these horrific actions.
A utilitarian could postulate that in order for something like nuclear warfare to happen, the utility created would have to offset the pain caused, which is unrealistic. However, since the notion of measuring pain could be disputed, all one has to do is make a compelling argument showing that pain could meta-physically not be

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