The "Greatest good for the greatest number": Is this a good land-use ethic?

Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

The greatest good.

The other day I met a little boy named Jeudi. Jeudi is a 3-year-old boy with a congenital heart defect—literally, a very small boy with a very big heart. And he needs surgery—soon. Unfortunately, Jeudi lives in Haiti, one of the lowest income countries in the world. Even before the earthquake in 2010, health care in Haiti was vastly inadequate. Many expensive, curative treatments for individual...

“The greatest good to the greatest number”: penicillin rationing on the American home front, 1940–1945

qualities, especially when we find ourselves caught in the soulless, pitiless existence Rapoport describes. Is he unfair? Even he gave the MGB the names of friends and colleagues (p. 120), though throughout the book he tells us the probable dire effects of doing so. Yet he also cites instances of men forgiving colleagues for their betrayal, acknowledging that they could not help it (pp. 210-11)...

The greatest unhappiness of the least number

We propose an alternative articulation of the Benthamite greatest-happinessof-the-greatest-number principle. With ordinally measurable and interpersonally noncomparable utilities, the rule chooses those feasible alternatives that maximize the number of individuals who end up with their greatest element. This rule is tantamount to the plurality rule. Furthermore, in the spirit of Rawls’s maximin...

What is ' the greatest virtue ' ?

Academics and practitioners have written much about what they believe are the key characteristics of effective marketing and strategy, including their view of any distinguishing supreme virtue, practice or goal. Similarly, philosophers, theologians and others have long speculated about what would be the greatest virtue, practice or goal of individuals and/or groups, but this is seldom if ever d...