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Summary: The Utility Principle

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1. IDENTIFICATION
How should the student handle her college athletic career, in light of the fact that she is pregnant?
Should pregnant athletes be automatically suspended from the team?
Should they lose their scholarship funding if they are suspended for being pregnant?

2. ANALYSIS **Unable to include chart in word file. Please see separate excel file in email**

3. APPLICATION
The Utility Principle states that: "The right action in any situation is the one that tends to produce the greatest possible balance of happiness over unhappiness for the greatest possible number."
This principle essentially turns ethical dilemmas into math problems. Multiply the level of happiness or unhappiness that a decision creates by the number of people for …show more content…

The only party that benefits in this scenario is the unborn child. All other parties experience unhappiness in one way or another, leading to net unhappiness: this option is impermissible.
Drop Out - This option also leads to unhappiness for everyone but the child. In this instance, even the child’s happiness is severely curtailed by the chances that its upbringing will be less positive with an undereducated mother. This makes it an overall negative option, and morally impermissible.
Suicide - This option removes the mother and child from the equation altogether, but leads to substantial unhappiness for everyone else involved. The unexpected death of a loved one or a close friend is extremely upsetting, and for those closest to the person that pain often lingers for a long time. That makes this morally impermissible, and certainly the worst option among all of those listed. C. Based on the scores, abortion is a slightly more positive option than doing nothing. It leads only to net happiness for the mother, with no negative impact on anybody else.

4. …show more content…

At the moment of conception, the child is little more than a collection of undifferentiated cells, not a human by any definition of the word. Even as the child continues to grow, it is entirely reliant upon the mother for sustained life, and the health and wellbeing of the mother must be taken into consideration. The human body can and often does terminate pregnancies. The mother’s body may reject a pregnancy for a multitude of reasons, which may relate to the health and wellbeing of the mother and her ability to carry the baby to birth, or the viability of the fetus. Ultimately, choosing to have an abortion is just one more way that the human body may choose to terminate an untenable

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