I think I have a decent understanding but love learning more and new perspectives help. Also what are the opposing viewpoints/philosophies?
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Look other people have tried this one but they don’t feel like actual explanations you’d try to give to a 5 year old.
So, utilitarianism is like that time your teacher had a pizza party for your class. Yeah, that one, the one where you only got half a slice of pizza and half a little cup of orange soda.
The reason why Mr Green only gave you half a slice and half a cup of soda is because he was only able to get 2 pizzas and 2 bottles of soda for the whole class. Now, because each pizza is usually sliced into 8 pieces per pizza, and because each soda bottle can only completely fill 8 little cups before it runs out, if Mr Green gave out a full slice and a full cup, he’d only be able to give 16 kids a slice of pizza and a cup of soda, instead of giving 32 kids half a slice and half a cup.
Urgh, yes, as I’ve told you before, that is why Mr Green had a full slice and a full cup to himself, because there were 30 of you in his class and there were 32 portions, meaning that in order to be fair to all the kids, instead of giving 2 other kids a full slice and a full cup, he ate a full slice and a full cup himself, I mean who do you think bought the pizza and the soda? The Pizza party fairy? No, Mr Green did that with his own money.
Utilitarianism is all about making choices that make the most people happy with the least amount of people being sad. If you imagine every pizza and every bottle of soda was able to give out, say, 16 happy points, that means that two pizzas and two sodas can give out a total of… (wait for the kid to try and work it out on their fingers and fail)
64! 64 happy points! So, if you have 30 kids in a class, what would be the best way to hand out those 64 happy points? (Kid tries to perform short division and again fails)
Alright I’ll tell you, the answer is you give each kid 2 happy points each, which means that each of the 30 kids gets two happy points each, and the remaining 4 happy points go to the teacher, to make him happy for paying for all of it.
Now yes, technically if we gave 15 kids and the teacher a full slice and a full cup, the whole class would be, on average, roughly 2 happy points per kid, but again, would you be happy if a kid that wasn’t you got 4 happy points and you got none? Utilitarianism says that this answer wouldn’t do, because although you may be super happy if you got a full slice and cup and got 4 happy points, that would come at the cost of another kid, who would have received 0 pizza, soda or happy points.
So essentially, utilitarianism says that the best way to make the most people happy is to take the thing that would make them happy and give as many people as possible the same amount of happiness, instead of making some people very happy and others not happy at all.
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