Posts Tagged ‘Business Ethics: Utilitarianism and Consequentialism a frightening life philosophy’

Business Ethics: Utilitarianism and Consequentialism a frightening life philosophy

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

As part of my studies I’m recently following a Business Ethics course.
Just recently as part of the studies we were introduced to a really weird ethical theory whose originator and forefather was Jere Bentham

To sum up the ethics perspective that Jeremy Bentham suggests as the highest possible moral is contained in the phrase:

“the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people”

The core of the philosophy so it’s really hard to resist it. From a Christian perspective I would say this perspective is openly satanic, since it finds the pleasure as the greatest and ultimate human goal.
Jeremy Bentham has quite a lot of wild ideas whose noways are very well implemented in society though many people doesn’t really realize it.

In Utilitarianism and it’s subdivision called Consequentialism , what really important is not the action we took but the the action outcome (consequence).

In Consequentialism and Utilitarianism there is no a clear conception about good and evil. But instead of good and evil are adopted the idea that everything could be measured in pleasure and pain. Therefore the real purpose of people’s life is reaching the maximum pleasure for everybody ..

Below I present you with two videos to give you a brief overview on what does Consequentialists believe and a very simple example to illustrate what this ethical system represents:

Just to close the post I give you a video to show you actually an example of How the Ford Company used Consequentialism philosophycal approach to save money for R&D and Car safety when designing their Ford Pinto
The company analysists sat down and calculated the monetary value of changing the card design which were prone of explosions if the oil tank is hit with a very low speed from behind with another vehicle and matched it against the possible life victioms if the car is just produced without the necessary car safety to be implemented calculating the costs for possible car crashes and the victims:
The video is really shocking and raises quite an interesting discussions …

I think people should start getting aware of the Dangers of corporatios behaving under the Utilirianistic ways in their daily company activities and start boycotting the company products before it’s too late.