ABSTRACT
Ethics has traditionally dealt with the personal setting of norms. In ethics, it is traditionally the person who is at the centre. This understanding has become too restrictive in modern society. This is because it is not only persons who come into situations of conflict where the customary normative references have lost their direct relevance. Differentiating between personal and role ethics has a long tradition in Protestant theology, where Luther introduced a distinction between the spiritual and the worldly regimes. Utilitarianism is the label applied to a wide tradition of ethics established by Bentham in the beginning of the 1800s. According to utilitarianism, the ethically correct action is that which compared with other possible actions, brings the greatest number of positive values. Utilitarianism possesses the same strengths and weaknesses as goal-oriented rational action. Utilitarianism could be called the administrator's ethics, in so far as the administrator acts with goal-oriented rationality within the administration.
