What Is Kant's Utilitarian Ethics

When facing moral dilemma, how we base our judgment often articulate with a reason or a principle, and the action we take should have a moral foundation. Immanuel Kant was born in 1724, and published his work Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in 1785. The Groundwork was published after the American War of Independence (1776) and before the French Revolution (1789). Kant had emphasised on human dignity and his political work, the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), had provided a strong basis for human right, which they called the Rights of Man at that time and offer today’s notion of the universal human rights (Sandel, 2009). Kant rejected the idea that morality and justice is to maximise collective happiness or promote virtue,

The moral claim on agreeing to use the pizza delivery guy’s life to save the five patients is based on utilitarianism scheme, by scarifying one life to save five other lives to maximise the overall happiness. Under utilitarianism, what is the right thing to do is measured by ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (Bentham, 1977: 393). The main idea of utilitarianism lay on the idea of maximising utility, in this context, utility means pleasure over pain, happiness over suffering. This is the highest principle of morality for utilitarianism, as we are all governed by our sovereign masters which are by pain and pleasure, therefore, they had to be taken in account when considering moral issue. In this case, letting five person live even giving up one life had provided a greater happiness than the five patient die without an organ transplant, this is an example of consequentialist moral reasoning which locates morality in term of the consequences of the action. The final outcome of using the pizza delivery guy’s life to save the five patients had an overall balance of pleasure over pain, in a utilitarian account it is the right thing to do. The pizza delivery guy’s personal will or right does not matter in this account, this will only count when his preferences should be counted along with everyone

First of all, Kant claimed that all human beings have a certain dignity that had to be respected. The biggest problem of utilitarianism is that action that could balance overall pleasure or happiness does not necessarily moral. It ‘contributes nothing whatever toward establishing morality, since making a man happy is quite different from making a man good and making him prudent or astute in seeking his advantage quite different from making him virtuous’ (Kant, 1964: 422). John Stuart Mill had argued that human happiness could be maximise in the long run if we uphold justice and respect the dignity of human, however, in a Kantian account, even justice and morality could be uphold eventually, the reason of respecting humanity is wrong. This utilitarian idea had fail to respect human dignity as ends and had used people as means as the outcome had been calculated to work the best in the long-run, and the measure was based on the consequences of the action instead of moral bases. In this case of organ transplant, using the pizza delivery guy’s life the other patients was using his life as means for the sake of the other five patients’ happiness, and his rights and dignity was not respected. Unlike the utilitarians assumed that human beings are wholly empirical, to Kant, morality is not empirical, which means no science could deliver morality, for this reason, morality cannot purely based on empirical