1. Consequentialism is the view that the morality of an act is based solely on the consequences of the act. The Principle of Utility states that actions are right if they promote pleasure and wrong if they promote pain. Pleasure and pain in this situation are associated with happiness and unhappiness.
2. One of Bernard William’s objections to Utilitarianism is that he believed that Utilitarianism will require violations of personal integrity. The example that William’s uses for this argument involves a situation in which two men are to make a decision, each depending on the integrity of the other. In this situation, a man is asked to either kill one Indian or none at all. If he chooses to kill the one Indian, he will be saving 19 other Indians; however, if he chooses to refrain from killing and Indians, all of…show more content… In this case, William’s explains how if the first man chooses to follow his own personal integrity and not kill any Indians, then it could lead to the second man violating his own integrity by killing all of the Indians. However, if the first man does choose to violate his own integrity and kill the one Indian to save the 19 others, the second man’s integrity may still be intact due to the fact that he did not have to engage in any killing. William’s argues that it would be impossible to make this decision because each man would have to live with the consequences of their own action in either case even though those consequences may be dependent on the other person.
3. Mill’s Rule-Utilitarian approach, an action is good if it conforms to a rule that generates the greatest happiness for the
