Is Ethical to Increase Minimum Wage

Thics is a natural comprehensive way of understanding life and the basis of moral judgement. Individuals have demonstrated different kinds of ethical thories in order to rationalize their behaviors and decision making. Typically this involves distinguishing right from wrong, defending and at the same time systemizing concepts. It is necessary to obtain a deep knowledge of human morality that should cohere to an individuals obligations and responsibilities. An ethical theory that has its strength and weaknesses is utilitarianism. This theory is not only based on an individuals ability to foretell their consequence, but to value justice and benevolence equally.

Utilitarianism is one of the ethical theories created by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The idea of this theory is ' The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number.' Although, utilitarianism is referred to as 'social hedonism,' it is different from the hedonists in the Greek-Roman period, it focuses on society and not a specific individual. This theory increases societies pleasure and diminishes societies pain. The main concern for utilitarianism to adopt the policies to increase social pleasures to view moral judgements not based on subjective intuitions but objective intuitions.

A specific example that illustrates the idea of utilitarianism, is raising the minimum wage from eight dollars to fifteen dollars an hour. From a utilitarianisms point of view, we would have to calculate the consequences and also weighing the benefits of the majority of the people. We would have to analyze certain data such as inflation, unemployment rates, sociologists, and workers self-esteem. This nevertheless is a complex task in which we resolve moral questions. On one hand, we calculate the difficulty of different options that increases social pleasure or decrease social pain. On the other hand, if it increases societies misery, then it is unpleasant. The degree of pleasure that is linked with the degree of goodness.

Although utilitarianismjustifies the difference between pleasure and pain, it also has its strength and weaknesses. According to John Stuart Mill, the sponsor fro this ethical thoery has included an important distinction between quality and quantity of pleasure. Strengths include happiness, which is a given value, utilitarianisms believe that harming an individual is wrong, objectivism, which includes the positive and negative effects of our actions are understanding right from wrong. The weaknesses that utilitarianism shows is the inability to predict what is actually going to happen in the future, immeasurability which you cannot put a price on an amount of pleasure, people cannot be trusted by acting selfishly upon themselves while still being considered 'good' and subjectivism, in which we have different ways of exhibiting and defining happiness.

Overall, utilitarianism is an ethical theory that differs from other approaches to morality. Utilitarianism is the maximizing of happiness as the purpose of morality. Thus based on our moral responsibility, it is to maximize the quality and quantity of pleasures that society may get into while lessening their pain.

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