Hedonistic Act-Utilitarianism

Zheng fan

Professor Megill

PHL 101 section 15

2017/11/13

Hedonistic act-utilitarianism

Society seems to be on the path of technology development.  The unending need for more and the need for the more to happen sooner is the driving force in a developing economy.  Some may argue that these technological advancements have improved the quality of life, allowing people to do more, but also it brings us some difficult ethical questions. In this assignment, I discussed an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality in “self-driving” car. We assume “self-driving” cars will be better at making safety decisions than human drivers but unable to avoid every conceivable accident. Since accidents occur immediately, how should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Most of us would say it should minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, others support it should protect the occupants at all costs. In my thought, I am comfortable with the idea that self-driving vehicles should be programmed to minimize the death toll. Accounting to  Bonnefon and co posted these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out what they thought.(  ) the results are beautiful, In general, people agreed with the same idea that protected the maximize people’s life. This is called hedonistic act utilitarian.

Hedonistic act-utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics which states that a person's act is morally right. And only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Utilitarian theory is that the moral thing to do is that which increases happiness, we should always strive to maximize utility. So the hedonistic act utilitarian wants you to do the thing that will maximize happiness in the particular case on the hand. “self-driving” car must be programmed to deal with different types of accident situations.

A commonly cited scenario involves the car having to decide between protecting the life of the driver and protecting the lives of a group of bystanders. Suppose, for example, one day your autonomous vehicle is driving you down a busy road, an unfortunate set of events causes the car to head toward a crowd of 10 people crossing the road. It cannot stop in time but it can avoid killing 10 people by steering into a wall. However, this collision would kill you, your car must make a quick decision. Hedonistic act-utilitarianism calculations show that steering into a wall will kill you, but others will survive. because killing one person is better than killing ten persons, you save the ten people’s life and achieve the maximize happiness.