If we were to analyze Utilitarianism closely, we would realize that they do not put any values on human life. In the Utilitarian point of view, every human life is worth the same. No matter what the status of the entity. Even if he were a president, or a teacher, or a janitor, or a beggar, everyone would be considered as one "unit" of human being. What Utilitarianism is all about, is consequences. How an action results in a consequence. If the consequence of an action is something good, then we gain positive utility, and negative utility otherwise. Therefore, Utilitarians

justify their actions by calculating the utility they derive from the consequences of their action.

Even in Utilitarianism, we could categorize them into mainly two parts. Benthams just emphasizes on treating the utility gained or lost as a unit by itself. Whereas Mills insists that even when judging an action only by the reviewing the consequences, we have to consider the magnitude of utility gained or lost by doing the action. Which is somewhat closer to the real life scenario. Therefore, there are many ways to look at whether or not to carry out an action, using the Utilitarian view.

Now what if the variable is the status of the hostage captured by the terrorists? Would the government differ in the amount of money paid because of it? If we were to view it in terms of Bentham, I would think that the government would not pay different amounts of money for two people with different status. Because as stated before, Bentham's views are people are all individual units, and the value of each human life is equal. The consequences of the actions are also of equal values of utility. Therefore, according to Bentham, the government shouldn't distinguish the status of a person by paying different amount of money for different status of the person. Whereas if we were to take Mill's stand in Utilitarian theory, similar to Bentham, all human life are of equal value. But the magnitude of the consequences may differ. For example, if a janitor were to be killed as a result of not paying the ransom, most probably the only people who will be affected by this would be the immediate family, and close friends and relatives. But if you were to consider the effect in the event the president was killed, not only the family would be affected, but the whole community, as they just lost a leader, and maybe even the whole state would be in turmoil as they recover from the shock of losing a leader. Therefore, in this case, the government should be willing to pay a larger amount of money for the president rather than the janitor.

In conclusion, I believe that Utilitarianism is still widely practiced throughout the world

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Approximate Word count = 1428
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)