Rights Theories:

an action is morally right if it adequately respects the rights of all humans (or at least all members of society). This is also sometimes referred to as Libertarianism, the political philosophy that people should be legally free Deontology:to do whatever they wish so long as their actions do not impinge upon the rights of others.

UTILITARIANISM AND BIOETHICS

In bioethics the influence of utilitarianism as an applied ethical theory is widely felt, both positively and negatively. On almost all substantive issues in the area, utilitarianism anchors one of the contending positions. Yet, it is the object of fierce criticism; nearly always to do with the challenges it poses to ordinary or conventional morality, especially in cases involving the taking of life, and to the distinctions that are supposed to carry the weight of that morality.

Classical Utilitarianism

Classical or act-utilitarianism is the view that an act is right if its consequences are at least as good as those of any alternative. In this form the view is consequentiality, welfarist, aggregative, maximizing, and impersonal, and the principle of utility that it endorses what might be called the utilitarian goal. The view is consequentiality, in that it holds that acts are right or wrong solely in virtue of the goodness or badness of their actual consequences. This view is sometimes called act-consequentialism, or, here, for reasons of brevity, simply consequentialism. It is matters to do with consequentialism, and the conflicts that consequentialist thinking is supposed to engender with ordinary morality in bioethics (and elsewhere), that has made the present topic one of note in contemporary bioethics. The view is welfarist, in that rightness is made a function of goodness, and goodness is understood as referring certainly to human welfare but also, perhaps, to animal welfare as well. The view is impersonal and aggregative, in that rightness is determined by considering, impersonally, the increases and diminutions in wellbeing of all those affected by the act and summing those increases and diminutions across persons. The view is a maximizing one: One concrete formulation of the principle of utility, framed in the light of welfarist considerations is "Always maximize net desire-satisfaction." The act-utilitarian goal, understood in the light of the above characterization, then, is to maximize (human) welfare. The crucial question to which this goal gives rise is how best to go about achieving it, and some contemporary actutilitarians have come to think that the best way of going about maximizing (human) welfare overall may be to forego trying to maximize it on each occasion. It is this insight, in some form or other, that has spurred the most important developments in act-utilitarianism todaydevelopments, however, that have not for the most part featured in bioethics, where the utilitarianism discussed and criticized remains classical or act-utilitarianism, with its embedded consequentialism.