Utilitarianism, created by Jeremy Bentham and, his student, John Stuart Mill, started in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the opposition to Christian ethics. Utilitarians hold that it is imperative that you minimize the greatest harm and maximize the greatest pleasure. As stated in the book, "Utilitarianism, "The sole end of human action is happiness." To achieve this maximum pleasure and minimum pain, you must apply the four main tenets of utilitarianism:...

E. Thompson, 'Empathy and Consciousness' in E. Thompson (ed) Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, Imprint Academic. 2001. Among the themes in this article (from the abstract): 'The concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy, understood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality. Empathy is the precondition (the condition of possibility) of the science of consciousness.' Evolutionary Origins of Morality : Cross-Disciplinary...

The idea of good and wrong is an idea that is present in some of the most heated debates. Because of this there have developed many theories that revolve around the idea of the moral worth of an action. Two philosophers that have contributed to these theories are Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant. Bentham's view on the moral worth of an action is based on the concept of utilitarianism and believes that all our motivations lie behind pleasure and pain. On the other hand Kant's theory of the moral...

A research philosophy such as positivism has a significance importance in the study of society. There are three research philosophies that are recognised in the literature to the study of society - interpretivism, realism and positivism. The aim of each of these philosophies is to endow with a distinctive view on the way knowledge is developed. These philosophies in the social science are contrasted on ontological, epistemological and methodological bases as outlined by Corbetta (2003, p.12-13)...

"Rather than comparing war to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale" (Clausewitz, 1976 [1832]. On War, Book I, Chapter 3, p.202-203). Already in 1832 Clausewitz wrote his famous book 'On war' (Zum Krieg) in which he states that war is the oldest form of competition between human organizations. He finds that...