Definiton of utiliatarianism and deontology?

1st year nursing student keeps getting conflicting information

utilitarianism means the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. So if killing one person makes a million people happy, you kill them. Dont know what deontology means though

The nature of Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question 鈥淲hat ought a man to do?鈥?Its answer is that he ought to act so as to produce the best consequences possible.


Basic concepts
In the notion of consequences the Utilitarian includes all of the good and bad produced by the act, whether arising after the act has been performed or during its performance. If the difference in the consequences of alternative acts is not great, some Utilitarians do not regard the choice between them as a moral issue. According to Mill, acts should be classified as morally right or wrong only if the consequences are of such significance that a person would wish to see the agent compelled, not merely persuaded and exhorted, to act in the preferred manner.

In assessing the consequences of actions, Utilitarianism relies upon some theory of intrinsic value: something is held to be good in itself, apart from further consequences, and all other values are believed to derive their worth from their relation to this intrinsic good as a means to an end. Bentham and Mill were hedonists; i.e., they analyzed happiness as a balance of pleasure over pain and believed that these feelings alone are of intrinsic value and disvalue. Utilitarians also assume that it is possible to compare the intrinsic values produced by two alternative actions and to estimate which would have better consequences. Bentham believed that a hedonic calculus is theoretically possible. A moralist, he maintained, could sum up the units of pleasure and the units of pain for everyone likely to be affected, immediately and in the future, and could take the balance as a measure of the overall good or evil tendency of an action. Such precise measurement as Bentham envisioned is perhaps not essential, but it is nonetheless necessary for the Utilitarian to make some interpersonal comparisons of the values of the effects of alternative courses of action.

definitions for deontology
an ethics based on acting according to duty or doing what is right, rather than on achieving virtue or on bringing about good consequences. It is too crude to make sharp divisions or to deny a place for more than one approach to ethics. Kant is the most important deontological theorist.

Utilitarianism, in ethics, the theory that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by its usefulness in bringing about the most happiness of all those affected by it. Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, which advocates that those actions are right which bring about the most good overall.

Deontological ethics or Dontology (Greek: Deon meaning obligation or duty) in ethics,is a theory holding that decisions should be made solely or primarily by considering one's duties and the rights of others.

One of the most important implications of deontology is that a person's behavior can be wrong even if it results in the best possible outcome. And an act can be righteous even if it results in a negative outcome. In contrast to consequentialism, a philosophy famous for its claim that the ends justify the means, deontology insists that how people accomplish their goals is usually (or always) more important than what people accomplish.

Utilitarianism - doctrine that the useful is the good; especially as elaborated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; the aim was said to be the greatest happiness for the greatest number

Deontology - The science related to duty or moral obligation.