Utilitarianism is what one ought to do, or what one should do to promote happiness without the presence of pain. Since it is always in everyone's interest you must account for all of the people effected directly or indirectly by the action.

Although there are different levels of pain and pleasure. One way to measure the values is by Utilitarianism calculus. Based on the action you assign a number say 1-10 in increasing value of pain or pleasure. You assign the numbers to several categories such as: intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent. Then you add up the pleasure side and the pain side, and which ever one is greater, that is what the action will cause. Based on this you should choose the action, which will promote the most pleasure.

Another problem is that you have to account for everyone effected by the outcome. This is hard to do because people are not always directly effected by the action. This can include people watching the evening news and see some crime committed. Therefore you would not be able to calculate and compare the pains. In my case with deciding to go out with my buddy instead of my girlfriend, it was evaluated by past experience on how she reacted. Saying all of this, experience sometimes helps, but does not always determine the effect of the action. Also, with the calculation, the time is not always there to do it in many situations. Nor is it possible to determine which action to do based on all of the people effected. It may be easier to account for all the people directly effected by the action, but to account for all of the indirectly effected people are often a hard task in any situation.

Utilitarianism states that everyone is effected equally by an outcome of an action. Back to my case, say if I went out with my girlfriend instead. Then just to say pretty much all of the night I would be wishing I were out with my friend. So I would be unhappy. My level of unhappiness might be greater than the level of unhappiness my girlfriend would go through if I did not go out with her. Just because weighing the fact that my friend might not come back for years is a long-term situation, while the effect of my girlfriends unhappiness is a short-term situation considering that I am making it up to her. Should the individual making the decision act out of his or her self-interest or not? In Utilitarianism you are to create the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In so

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Approximate Word count = 1135
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)