Ethics and Universal Value
Universal value plays a different role in virtue ethics, deontological and teleological or consequentialist moral theories. Consequentialist theories are based on the idea that right actions are those that lead to a result that has universal value. Some utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham for example, have argued that pleasure and pain are the only things that are of universal intrinsic value; that is, that pleasure and pain are the only things that are valued for themselves, and other things are of value only because they produce pleasure or pain. Because utilitarians are consequentialists, this means that utilitarians who hold pleasure and pain to be the only things of universal value then argue that actions are right when they maximise pleasure and minimise pain, when everyone is considered equally.
Read more about this topic: Universal Value, Philosophy
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