Assignment task:
Both bullying and justice for formerly incarcerated people do indeed offer us a great opportunities to explore utilitarianism and the idea that laws and policies should be crafted in order to achieve the greater good. Thus, let's look a bit more closely at the main ideas of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism has both a political and an ethical dimension; in fact, we will be discussing utilitarianism as an ethical theory next week. When the principle of utility is evoked in the context of a personal ethical dilemma, the question is that of how much pleasure and pain one's own actions will generate, as well as the quality, intensity, duration, etc. of the pleasure. When the principle of utility is evoked in the context of a personal ethical dilemma, the question is that of how much pleasure and pain one's own actions will generate. John Stuart Mill emphasized the quality of the pleasures more than his predecessor Jeremy Bentham (Mitchell, 2019, 376). The political dimension of utilitarianism comes into play when we are discussing the government structure, laws, and policies that will best maximize the greater good. How might Bentham and/or Mill's approaches to determining the happiness and suffering to be yielded by the policies you all are calling for differ?