Can a utilitarian be committed to promoting more than one objective?

Utilitarianism, as you remember, is the view, which says that the right thing to do maximises the overall amount of good. At first glance, there is nothing that would prevent a utilitarian from promoting more than one kind of good. Of course, most traditional utilitarians focus on one ultimate thing they want to maximise - whether it be happiness, pleasure or welfare. But there are also utilitarians, who think there are many things worth promoting. These can, but do not have to include truth, knowledge or beauty. The proponents of this view are called "pluralists" or "objective list theorists". What is problematic about their stance is that we can easily think of a situation, when maximising good A would diminish the amount of good B. It is easy for plurarists to run into self-contradiction. One way out of this problem is attaching different weights to different goods, which might help guide moral actions. Another possible problem with objective-list theories is the question of who and how would compose the lists. A plurarist utilitarian theory fails without a convincing account of why it involves a certain list of goods to be promoted, rather than another.

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Answered by Krzysztof K. Philosophy tutor

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