Pros And Cons Of Utilitarianism And Kant's Duty Ethics

James Liang pleaded guilty earlier in September, 2016 to a plea agreement with the government on the account that Liang “…developed a software “defeat device” to manufacture vehicles to appear cleaner than they were.” When these vehicles were actually driven, they produced 40 times the allowed level of pollutants, which the company, Volkswagen, has agreed to pay $15.3 billion in civil penalties such as compensating owners and to buy back or fix the cars that have already been bought. Using two news reports on this case, Liang’s actions will be assessed according to rule utilitarianism and Kant’s duty ethics. Liang’s actions paired to Kant’s duty ethics will look at Liang’s will and the categorical imperative as a whole. Whereas Liang’s actions
Believing a ‘good will’ was the only unqualifiedly good virtue, Kant said every other virtue could be used for an immoral purpose. Kant drew the line on whether actions were deemed acceptable was in the categorical imperative, which states that an unconditional moral is binding in all circumstances and does not depend on a person’s inclination. To form more sense of this, a person could think “will everyone act as I propose to do?”, if not, then do not perform the act. Also, “is my action, not merely for my own purpose, but respects the goals of human beings?”, where the moral of the actions need to establish a law for a hypothetical
A rule utilitarian could identify this in two ways, one way being a more selfish scenario or a broader scenario. In the selfish scenario, Liang’s consequences for lying as well as deceiving the consumers together with the government about his engines passing the emissions test could have meant his engine selling. This then could possibly lead to him getting bonuses or a raise for creating a new engine to put into Volkswagen vehicles that pass the strict emissions test. Until Liang is caught, the consequence of lying to the public for personal gain outweighs the fact his engines were producing 40 times the limit