Utilitarianism view on a dilemma - Essay Example

If we have chosen the option A and it has a great number of happy consequences as compare to option B, then the decision will be perfect. That all depends upon the great number of goodness. The ethical dilemma, which we have given, is a critical one. According to this dilemma, if a ship is sinking and there is only one life boat on the ship. The life boat has the capacity of only ten people but there are thirty people stranded in the sinking ship. The captain has two options for the utility of the life boat.

One is to kill twenty people and save the rest of ten people in the life boat. On the other hand, he may let all them to die on a natural death and thus no one would be killed. In this situation, the dilemma is not of great number of goodness rather it can be explained using the lesser number of sorrow, pain or sadness while selecting anyone option. In this situation, the captain has no choice of having great number of goodness rather he can select only the option where he may have less sorrow over the consequences.

If he selects the option of saving ten people on the utility of the life boat then there will be happiness that at least he has saved some people from the danger of death. In this option, he can fully utilize the opportunity of the utility of life boat. However, the dark side of this decision is the killing of more than ten people. This means that if he is saving ten people from death then on the other he is pushing twenty people to towards the death. Here in this situation the number of happiness is less as compare to the number of sorrow or the number of pain.

We can say that under the umbrella of utilitarianism, the captain might not go with this decision that he can save ten people while pushing twenty other people to the death. The captain has another second option to adopt for the people. He may not kill any person in the sinking ship rather they may die their natural death. This means that he does not