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- UTILITARIANISM IS A FLAWED MORAL THEORY
- EXTERNAL, AUTHORITY-BASED ETHICAL SYSTEMS ARE FLAWED
- DEONTOLOGY PROVIDES NO STABLE BASIS FOR JUDGING ACTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHYBiographical Data. Retrieved from http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/philosophy/arpa/glover.htm. Last Accessed July 20, 2006. Biographical Data. Retrieved from Kings College http://www.kcl.ac.uk/175/biogs/glover.html. Last accessed July 20, 2006. Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. ---. (editor). Utilitarianism and its Critics. New York: MacMillan, 1990. ---. Causing Death and Saving Lives. New York: Penguin, 1977. ---. I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity. London: Allen Lane, 1988. ---. Responsibility. New York: Humanities Press, 1970. ---. The Glover Report: The Ethics of New Reproductive Technologies. A Report for the European Commission, 1989. ---. What Sort of People Should There Be? Location Unknown: Pelican, 1984. Pinker, Steven. “All About Evil.” New York Times Book Review. 10/29/2000. New York Times Schweiker, William. “Loose morals: the barbaric 20th century. - Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, by Jonathan Glover” Christian Century. May 17, 2003. UTILITARIANISM IS A FLAWED MORAL THEORY1. UTILITARIANISM OFTEN CANNOT BE PRACTICALLY APPLIED Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1990 UTILITARIANISM AND ITS CRITICS, 3 Some of the objections to utilitarianism are practical. It is said to be unworkable. We can predict only some of the consequences of actions. We have no way of measureing happiness. We cannot say, for instance, that the birth of a child gives the parents three hundred and seven times the happiness they would get from a holiday in France. There are further difficulties about comparing the happiness of different people. The weighing of consequences seems more often a matter of vague intuition than of scientific calculation. 2. UTILITARIANISM WARRANTS PROBLEMATIC CONSEQUENTIALIST ACTION Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1990 UTILITARIANISM AND ITS CRITICS, 4 Other objections have been to the way utilitarians seem to accept that “the end justifies the means.” It is a form of consequentialism: the view that acts are never right or wrong in themselves, but only because of their consequences. But can it be right that whether or not to torture a child should be decided by cool calculation of consequences? What sort of people would we become if we adopted this attitude? 3. UTILITARIANISM REDUCES ALL VALUE TO HAPPINESS Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1990 UTILITARIANISM AND ITS CRITICS, 3 Some object to the reduction of all value to happiness. Bentham said that happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. But is cheerful hedonism really the only way of life that is valuable in itself? Others object that the largest total of happiness might be compatible with unjust inequalities in its distribution, or with policies that trample on people’s rights. And utilitarianism has problems over life and death. Can it avoid saying that persistently unhappy people (or just people persistently below average happiness) should be killed if they cannot be cheered up? Would a utilitarian have a duty to have children if they were likely to be happy? EXTERNAL, AUTHORITY-BASED ETHICAL SYSTEMS ARE FLAWED1. APPLICATION OF MORAL PRINCIPLES FAILS TO ACCOUNT FOR PRACTICAL DILEMMNAS Jonathan Glover, Philosopher, 1999 HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, pg. 6 It is possible to assume too readily that a set of moral principles simply needs to be ‘applied.’ The result can be the mechanical application of some form of utilitarianism, or list of precepts about justice, autonomy, benevolence and so on. When this happens, the direction of thought is all one way. The principles are taken for granted, or ‘derived’ in a perfunctory way, and practical conclusions are deduced from them. What is missing is the sense of two-way interaction. The principles themselves may need modifying if their practical conclusions are too Procustean, if they require us to ignore or deny things we find we care about when faced with the practical dilemmas 2. EXTERNAL MORALITY COMMANDS OBEDIENCE; DENIES PROGRESS Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, 1978, pp. 106-7 Since at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have been human herds (clan unions, communities, tribes, nation states, churches) and very many who obeyed compared with very few who were in command; since, therefore, obedience was the trait best and longest exercised and cultivated among men, one may be justified in assuming that on the average it has become an innate need, a kind of formal conscience that bids “thou shalt do something or other,” in other words, “thou shalt.” This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on how strong, impatient, and tense it is, it seizes upon all things with little discrimination, like a gross appetite, and accepts whatever meets its ear, whatever any representative of authority (parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, public opinion) declaims into it. The strange limitation of human evolution, the factors that make for hesitation, protractedness, retrogression, and circular paths, is due to the fact that the herd-instinct of obedience is best inherited at the expense of knowing how to command.
1. IN PRACTICE, DEONTOLOGY YIELDS TO CONSEQUENTALISTS “THRESHOLD DEONTOLOGY” Larry Alexander, 2000 SAN DIEGO LAW REVIEW, accessed May 4, 2006, http://web.lexis-nexis.com.mcc1.library.csulb.edu/universe/document?_m=5c662443949a5d4459860d7ef558544e&_docnum=3&wchp=dGLbVlb-zSkVb&_md5=6a21a932b6ac5484a610dc92c66b6bd3 In his 1989 law review article, Torture and the Balance of Evils, Michael Moore declares himself to be a "threshold deontologist." What he means is this: There are some acts that are morally wrong despite producing a net positive balance of consequences; but if the positive balance of consequences becomes sufficiently great - especially if it does so by averting horrible consequences as opposed to merely making people quite well off - then one is morally permitted, and perhaps required, to engage in those acts that are otherwise morally prohibited. Thus, one may not kill or torture an innocent person in order to save two or three other innocent people from death or torture - even though purely consequentialist considerations might dictate otherwise. However, if the number of innocent people who can be saved from death or torture gets sufficiently large, then what was morally proscribed - the killing or torture of an innocent person - becomes morally permissible or mandatory
Larry Alexander, 2000 SAN DIEGO LAW REVIEW, accessed May 4, 2006, http://web.lexis-nexis.com.mcc1.library.csulb.edu/universe/document?_m=5c662443949a5d4459860d7ef558544e&_docnum=3&wchp=dGLbVlb-zSkVb&_md5=6a21a932b6ac5484a610dc92c66b6bd3 Moore acknowledges that threshold deontology might appear arbitrary and irrational. As he puts it, "Why should goodness of consequences not count at all and then, at some point, count enormously in the sense that it fully determines the rightness of action?" Moore's answer to this question is that consequences always count, even below the threshold, but until the threshold is reached, consequentialist principles are outweighed by deontological ones. He analogizes the deontological norms to a dam, and the consequentialist considerations to water building up behind it. Eventually, if enough water builds up, it will reach and exceed the dam's height - which is analogous to the threshold of threshold deontology. 3. ONCE MET, THE DEONTOLOGICAL THRESHOLD MANDATES OTHERWISE IMPERMISSABLE, OR CONSEQUENTALIST, ACTIONS Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, 2006 STANFORD LAW REVIEW, accessed May 4, 2006, http://lawreview.stanford.edu/content/issue3/sunstein1.pdf A more precise formulation would be “permitted or obliged,” because it is unclear which moral modality holds, according to threshold deontology, once the baseline deontological prohibition is waived. Without digressing too far into moral theory, we suggest that, conditional on accepting threshold deontology, the agent is obliged (not merely permitted) to promote the best overall consequences once the threshold has been crossed. In our view, it would be distinctly odd to say that a moral agent is permitted to infringe deontological constraints to save a large number of lives, but is not obliged to do so. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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