Ethics
Hobbes’ Naturalism leads to the Utilitarianism of John
Stuart Mill.
THE POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY OF UTILITARIANISM
Hobbes’ conception
of people as calculating machines who made moral decisions by summing negative
values of pain with positive values of pleasure and choosing the most positive
result made the current society of the time to be just as poor, nasty, brutish,
and short as primitive society.
Individuals were a collection of monads in a soup of will-to-power. That accretions of power determined the value
of an individual was the determining factor in Hobbes’ Anti-humanistic
humanism. The Naturalistic theory of
ethics continued as Montesquieu and Voltaire attempted to sew the similarities
across societies into a web that would describe ethics in the way that Newton
Philosophies of
humankind are the foundation for ethical systems. Philosophies of humankind lead toward theories
of ethical behavior. For Rationalistic
ethicists a moral maxim that is true, participates in a form of truth that does
not allow for mutability. Their
definitions are what demarcates the dichotomy of moral philosophy that is the
debate between Naturalism and Rationalism.
The examination and analysis of opinions concerning values is moral
philosophy. Ethics is moral philosophy
brought out of its Ivory Tower in Königsberg and sends it into the
marketplace of ideas in order to answer the primary question, “What then,
should we do now?”
Philosophy
attempts to conceptualize ethics in a comprehensive systematic way by means of
integration. Ethical theory is the
attempt to describe moral values and cultural norms as they are expressed in
human behavior. The idiosyncrasies of
each individual philosopher express themselves in the differences in their
ethical theories. A calculus of
egalitarianism is the heart of Utilitarianism.
Roman ethical
tradition was mostly influenced by the Stoics.
They were called by this name because of the prominent Stoa (Stoa) or porch at their primary school
building. The major teachers of Stoicism
were Zeno and Epicetus. Their theory of
ethics was a deontological theory of duty.
The epicureans were the first utilitarians. Epicurus disagreed with the ethics of duty. He felt that ethics were a function of
feeling instead of reason. His teachings
date from circa the third century before the Common Era.
Sensations were, according to
Epicurus, composed of both good and evil in the forms of pleasure and
pain. He taught Aristotle’s moderation
because an excess of pleasure becomes pain.
Courage, justice, and friendship were his cardinal virtues. Epicurus taught that people determined their
own fates since the gods were not actively engaged in the lives of individuals.
Two millennia later Jeremy
modernized these teachings under the banner Utilitarianism.
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