Fayeq Sakhi Zada (25 November 2019)

Every day we have to make decisions, we have to ask ourselves what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do. But how do we make these decisions? How do we know what is right or wrong? The study of ethics can give us some answers. I would like to talk about two different approaches, two different ways to make ethical decisions: the rights approach and the utilitarian approach.

First, we use the idea of rights to talk about many ethical problems. This idea of rights comes originally from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth century German philosopher. This principle says that each individual has the freedom to make choices and that other people must respect those choices. Let’s take the right to free speech as an example. Freedom of speech means two things: First that I have the right to say whatever I want, and second that the other persons must respect my right to speak. According to the rights approach, an ethical action must respect an individual’s choices, the power of the individual to make own decisions. To decide if an action is ethical using the rights approach, we must always ask how this action affects the individual’s freedom to make choices.

The utilitarian approach was made popular in the nineteenth century by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. In this approach, the most important thing is not the individual’s rights. The most important thing is making the world a better place. Here an ethical action is one that creates the greatest amount of good. Let’s take, for example, paying taxes. The government collects taxes from individual. Most people do not like paying taxes because they have less money to spend on other things. However, taxes help the community as a whole; and pays for things like hospitals, roads, schools, parks, and things that benefit everyone. Even though paying taxes is bad for some people individually, it is good for the majority, for most people in the community. To decide if an action is ethical following the utilitarian approach, we must ask what action will cause the greatest good for the most people.

Let’s take a real-world example and look at how to make a decision using these two approaches, that is the rights approach and the utilitarian approach. Let’s look at the question of smoking in public. In the late 1990s this became an issue in many places when smoking was banned in office buildings, schools, restaurants, and so on in many countries. The question is how do we make a decision about whether to ban smoking in public or not?

When you look at the problem from the rights approach, we have to ask how does smoking in public affect individual rights and we have to look at the rights of two groups of people – smokers and non-smokers. First, let’s look at the rights of smokers. Smokers will say that they should be free to smoke wherever they want and other people should respect that right, even if they do not like it. What about nonsmokers? Nonsmokers would say that they should be free to breathe clean air and that smokers should respect that right. Smokers should not force people to breathe the smoke of their cigarettes passively. This shows us one of the problems of using the rights approach because when you have two groups, how do you decide whose rights are more important – smokers or nonsmokers?

From another point of view, following the utilitarian approach we have to ask what creates the greatest amount of good – allowing smoking in public places or banning it? What is good about allowing smoking in public places? Well! Smokers will be happy. But it causes a lot of harm. Overall you can argue that the ethical choice is to impose a ban on smoking in public places because it creates the greater good. Public places will be healthier and we will save money on health costs because fewer people will get sick.

In conclusion, through this example, we can see the differences between looking at an ethical problem from the rights approach and from the utilitarian approach.

(Fayeq Sakhi Zada is a student at the Faculty of Law and Political Science, Kabul University, and a volunteer with ACKU. Views expressed are personal.)