According to the Pinto case, it is not moral to put a price tag on human lives because they do not include various factors concerning the humans during the loss of their lives. Human lives are found once and never return; thus cannot be valued at any cost because the cost valuations would not include various factors such as emotional losses of their families (2022). The loss of lives resulted in some loss of family earnings, breadwinners of such families lost their lives, and they lost a loved one who has emotional ties with the family that is irreplaceable in monetary forms. People’s lives do not qualify for any price tag; thus, any valuation of human lives is not a moral act because it does not involve the loss of years of the life of the individuals that cannot be reversed back. After all, they are long gone. The monetary value of human life does not take care of real-life factors such as the loss suffered by the family.
Utilitarianism would enhance respect for minority rights. Utilitarianism gets to focus on various issues advocating for pleasure and fostering happiness; thus, everyone should be considered to deserve equality irrespective of their status. Therefore, putting a lower value on human love would demean others; therefore, utilitarianism would save the minority groups from being equated to low-value materials than majority group individuals. Utilitarianism would help understand that all individuals have the same rights to happiness and enjoy every kind of pleasure. It would further emphasize that the pain endured by an individual should exceed the satisfaction enjoyed by thousands of people because everyone deserves to live happily and be freed from any form of pain; just like Christians during the Rome times, they were not to be thrown to lions.
The contemporary moral issue in our society is voluntary prostitution. According to the utilitarian theory, people are engaged in evaluating the choices they face and make decisions that provide them with pleasure. Unlike forced prostitution, individuals engage in voluntary prostitution due to the fun they get out of the consequences they get from the act(Fok et al., 2016). Even though prostitution is morally unprecedented and not encouraged by society, individuals engaged in voluntary prostitution are attached to prostitution because it comes with pleasure which may be popular among the other members of society.
Fast forward, individual interest plays out significantly when people embrace voluntary prostitution. Egoism is described as an occasion when people decide what to do for themselves and consider only their utility. Society considers prostitution of any kind immoral. However, people engage in voluntary prostitution because the pleasure and benefits they get from voluntary prostitution meet their individual needs rather than the interest of other people. Egoism and particular interest place the outcomes of voluntary sex work as more beneficial than the attack on the personal dignity of selling their bodies. Therefore, they are able to have the benefits of pleasure and monetary terms that come with the act (Mackenzie, 2014). The consequential evaluation from an egoistic perspective places the benefits of sex as more important than the negative impacts of dignity placed by society on commercial sex works.
Moral judgment is a multifaceted ideal, and people often need to judge what is best for them and those groups to which individuals belong. According to utilitarianism, actions are considered right insofar as they promote happiness and wrong insofar as they produce unhappiness (Fok et al., 2016). Using this consequentialism principle, people engage in voluntary prostitution as a source of happiness; therefore, when they are not allowed to take a such particular action, they become unhappy. Essentially, the utilitarian theory suggests that the morality of any action can only be decided based on its consequences. Therefore, people would argue that their engagements in voluntary prostitution bring them happiness and pleasure derived from it (Mackenzie, 2014), even though this argument would be controversial when it can be argued that an act’s morality depends on its motive. Nonetheless, the consequentialism of voluntary sex work depends on the pleasure and the benefits associated with the outcome of the act.
Similarly, while the egoistic approach focuses on individual happiness, the principle that everyone’s happiness counts equally can be used to explain the rationale beyond voluntary prostitution. The principle of general happiness is achieved when individuals are allowed to focus on their happiness and the people around them. This principle can be used to claim that people involved in commercial sex work should be allowed to enhance their happiness which is critical in promoting general happiness. The source of happiness is diverse from one person to another (Mackenzie, 2014). For instance, an individual may be happy playing football which may also be a source of injuries and pain to others. Therefore, maximizing individual happiness is critical for the general happiness of society.
Pleasure or happiness is the only thing that has intrinsic value. According to utilitarianism, the bone of contention is the preference for utility rather than usefulness. Voluntary prostitution maximizes individual utility rather than usefulness (Mackenzie, 2014). People would decide to carry out commercial sex work due to its intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is placed on something when it promotes happiness and pleasure.
Consequently, it helps people cope in society (Fok et al., 2016). Therefore, it is arguable that people choose voluntary prostitution as an intrinsic value because it promotes their happiness and pleasure and enables them to cope. Therefore morality of voluntary commercial sex work can be controversial from an ethical perspective. However, it has intrinsic value to the members of society as a source of happiness and pleasure.
Reference
Youtube.com. (2022). [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2Rq4HJBxw> [Accessed 24 September 2022].
Fok, L. Y., Payne, D. M., & Corey, C. M. (2016). Cultural values, practical orientation, and ethical decision making: A comparison of US and Puerto Rican professionals. Journal of Business Ethics, 134(2), 263–279.
Mackenzie, R. (2014, November). Sexbots: replacements for sex workers? Ethical constraints on the design of sentient beings for utilitarian purposes. In Proceedings of the 2014 Workshops on Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference (pp. 1-8).
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