Week 8 exercise Question 4

4.     Discuss software duplicating from the perspectives of act utilitarianism.

Act Utilitarianism is the value of the consequences of the particular act that counts when determining whether the act is right - measures the consequences of a SINGLE ACT.

Principle:

“An action is right (or wrong) to the extent that it increases (or decreases) the total happiness of the affected parties”

On this situation, I would suggest to consider the consequences of affected parties is the group/company that create the software instead of the people that use the system because most of the software are created are open source/ free. Take Linux for example, linux is the OS for computer. Everyone have all the access to the software and the code can be modified. This proved that most computer programmer would like to share the improvement of the software to everyone since they would like to see the extent of that software. But in this modern age, some people like to make the software as a bargain product instead on focusing development of computer for mankind.

So software duplications is not wrong in the perspective of act utilitarianism since the people that utilized software as bargain product is less than people who gave it as free product. This can be proved by the quality of both product. Most of free product are much better than payable product because the people that create/ improve the payable product just focus on customer needs only instead focusing on general user. The example I can give is C-cleaner because this software can help user reduce the storage space and improve the performance of computer but the payable product did not focus on this because they researched that ‘most’ can do it on their own but not for beginner user.

So the conclusion is software duplication is not wrong.