Jeremy Bentham and Utilitarianism

As the Minister of Internal Affairs and Disaster Control, I am going to use the Hedonistic Calculus to figure out the effects of implementing a new disaster management policy. The current problem is that River Carpathian floods twice every year killing dozens of people with a distance of 1.5 kilometers on either side of the river. However, due to agricultural purposes, people are drawn back to establishing settlements on the same zone. In this case, my ministry has drafted a disaster management policy that would evict people from the affected areas and allocate the people to a much safer place that is less productive. Yearly, about 300 people die from floods from the effects of flooding. However, with the ability to save all these deaths, about 50 people may die from lack of sufficient food following this decision.

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that selects the best option that one can take to limit the negative effects and make sure that the number of people negatively affected by any particular decision is lesser than that affected positively (Soccio, 363).  Considering the pressing issue in this case, people have to be moved from the disaster area but a sixth of those who could have died through the disaster will still die from hunger (intensity). The duration within which the solution is likely to last is, saving 250 people every year hence presenting a lifetime trend. The certainty that deaths will occur is eminent whether people are moved or not. Given that weather is unpredictable around this region, propinquity cannot be quantified, because there is a probability of 70 percent that flooding can occur without warning. Given that safety is a pleasure and poor productivity of the new land is a pain, fecundity to purity ratio is 5:1. In a community of more than 20,000 people with a 2% growth annually, the extent of the people affected positively is 83.333% (⁵/₆ of 100). In this case, the disaster management policy works through the application of the 7 steps of the Hedonistic Calculus (Soccio, 370).