For our Discussion 3 this week, we want to apply the utilitarian method to the article on Charlottesville (on BB). Let’s try to list ALL the positive and negative consequences of people outing participants of the white suprematist rally on social media. Then weighing all the possible consequences in terms of Bentham’s criteria, we should be able to come to a conclusion regarding the rightness of wrongness of these actions.

Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century philosopher who explicitly developed this theory, gives us 7 different criteria to judge consequences: intensity (of pleasure or pain); duration; likelihood/certainly (of a consequence to happen or not); proprinquity (how close or far away a consequence is in time and space); purity (how much of its opposite does it contain); fecundity (will it produce more of the same); number of people affected.

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/internet-ethics/resources/social-efforts-to-id-charlottesville-marchers/