Crisis in the Middle East

Jeremy Bentham born in 1748 was a radical empiricist. He believed strongly in the fact that knowledge absolutely had to come from the senses; it could not be invented by the mind. Jeremy Bentham was a strange man, often looked at like an oddball. He was strongly negative. He was anti-establishment, anti monarchist and anti imperialist. Bentham wrote a book called “Introduction to the Principals of Morals and Legislation”. (Moral Questions: An Introduction to Ethics, 2000). In this book he discus’s how human being are under the governance of two sovereign masters pain and pleasure, we will do anything to feel pleasure and do anything to avoid pain. It iterated the point that laws should only be passed should it maximize pleasure for the greater good and minimize pain. This is the beginning of utilitarianism, greater happiness for the greater good.

Later in 1806 a man named John Stuart Mill was born. Just as Bentham he to was a utilitarian but he was able to see deeper into the subject then Bentham. He stated that “peoples motives could not be seen or measured but the consequences could be”. He began a new group of thought that was an offset of utilitarianism and it was called Consequentialism. Mill thought that more normal people should stick to traditional rules rather than calculate what to do all the time. If people spent all there time calculating the moral moves from the immoral rules without having a moral base to work off of, the world would be a ludicrous place.

However, there are still shortcomings to both utilitarianism and Consequentialism. If we are always trying to please the greater good, there is always a minority such as immigrants or the less fortunate that will be continuously suffering. Only obeying rules, which experience shows, will produce greater good for the greater number. For morality to function perfectly it is a matter of everyone obeying the rules all the time, even then we could not guarantee the right of individuals or...