Sentence examples for utilitarian thinking from inspiring English sources

Russia, on the other hand, does not fall back on utilitarian thinking in times of crisis.

This kind of utilitarian thinking is what produces ridiculous surveys telling us that students who have taken a gap year may have earned less by the time they are 30.

Therefore, criticism directed against expected utility maximization does not necessarily show a defect in utilitarian thinking.

Time and again, common sense collapses into utilitarian thinking, or is shown to presuppose it, or is at least revealed as requiring something very like it.

In classical utilitarian thinking, pioneered by Jeremy Bentham, welfare refers to happiness which, in turn, is understood as the net balance of pleasure over pain that the individual experiences (Bentham 1789).

But if the aggregation of interests can yield collective rights, a morality of rights may begin to assume the character of, and to present the same dangers as, the very sort of utilitarian thinking that many rights-theorists intend it to preclude.

The utilitarian way of thinking also ignores new opportunities.

These decision makers were thinking in a utilitarian mode about maximizing the number of relatively healthy lives they could save, although there is little if any research to suggest these types of triage decisions improve overall survival.

Such thinking embodies the utilitarian point of view that harm to one person may be justified by a larger benefit to someone else (Harris 2003).

The survey discovered four reasons: 1) Authoritarian (parents, pastor, or authority figure said so); 2) Rational (thinking it through); 3) Utilitarian (safer to believe than not); and 4) Empirical (personal, spiritual experience).

Such generality (in not distinguishing between pursuing good and avoiding bad) would fit a line of thinking present sporadically in the utilitarian tradition and culminating in the twentieth century behaviorist notion of positive reinforcement.