UTILITARIANISM/CONSEQUENTIALISM SHOULD DETERMINE THE “JUST”

UTILITARIANISM/CONSEQUENTIALISM SHOULD DETERMINE THE “JUST”

1. ACTIONS THAT MAXIMIZE THE GREATER GOOD ARE MORALLY JUSTIFIED

Charles Fried, Professor of Law at Harvard, 1994.

ABSOLUTISM AND ITS CRITICS, p. 170.

This line of analysis is enough to show that some quite plausible interpretations of absolute norms lead to impossibly stringent conclusions, lead in fact to total paralysis. But the case is in fact even worse. For it the absoluteness of the norm is interpreted to mean that the consequences – such as the death of an innocent person – is overwhelmingly bad, then not only are we forbidden to do anything, for anything carries with it a risk of death, we are indeed required to do nothing but to seek out ways to minimize the deaths of innocent persons. For if such a death is so bad that no good can outweigh it, we are surely not justified in pursuing some good, even if that good does not present this risk when we might instead be preventing this most undesirable of all consequences. So this interpretation is to actually a prescription for paralysis, it is more like an obsession. This norm, by virtue of this view of its absoluteness, takes over the whole of our moral life.
2. CONSEQUENTIALIST THEORIES ARE JUST BECAUSE THEY SAVE THE MOST LIVES

David Wasserman and Alan Strudler the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, 2003.

“Can a Nonconsequentialist Count Lives?,” PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, 31.1, p. 72.

In making choices about saving people from death, what moral significance should attach to the fact that one choice involves saving more people than another? Consequentialists typically have an easy time with such questions because they believe that the morally best choice produces the best consequences and that, other things being equal, more lives saved is a better consequence than fewer lives saved. The consequentialist position involves what might be called the compensation assumption: the proposition that other things equal, the gain that comes from saving a larger group of people somehow more than compensates for the loss that occurs by not saving some other, smaller group of people.

Robert Goodin, Philosopher at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National Defense University, 1998.

UTILITARIANISM AND PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY, p. 38.

The great advantage of utilitarianism as a guide to public conduct is that it avoids gratuitous sacrifices, it ensures as best we are able to ensure in the uncertain world of public policy-making that policies are sensitive to people's interests or desires or preferences. The great failing of more deontological theories applies to those realms, is that they fixate upon duties done for the sake of duty rather than for the sake of any good that is done by doing one's duty. Perhaps it is permissible (perhaps it is even proper) for private individuals in the course of their personal affairs to fetishize duties done their own sake. It would be a mistake for public officials to do likewise, not least because it is impossible.

Andrew Sayer, Department of Sociology Lancaster University, May 2004.

“Restoring the Moral Dimension: Acknowledging Lay Normativity,” Accessed 12-15-2008, .

Emotions – as authors like Martha Nussbaum, Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier, Jack Barbalet and Bennett Helm emphasize – have a cognitive and evaluative character: they are embodied evaluative judgements regarding matters partly or wholly independent of us which are thought to affect our well-being (Nussbaum, 2001; Archer, 2000, 2003; Collier, 2003, Barbalet, 2001, Helm, 2001). They are about something. They provide unarticulated commentaries on our situation. They are ". . . highly discriminating evaluative responses, very closely connected to beliefs about what is valuable and what is not" (Nussbaum, 1993, p. 239). We need to reject the treatment of emotions as opposed to reason. On the contrary emotions can be rational. To be sure the evaluative judgements provided by emotions are fallible, but then so too is reason.

UTILITARIANISM/CONSEQUENTIALISM SHOULD DETERMINE THE “JUST”

1. UTILITARIANISM PROTECTS RIGHTS FOR THE SOCIAL GOOD

Mirko Bagaric, Professor of Law and Head of Deakin Law School and Julie Clarke Lecturer, Deakin Law School, Spring, 2005.

“Not Enough Official Torture in the World? The Circumstances in Which Torture Is Morally Justifiable,” UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO LAW REVIEW, 39 U.S.F. L. Rev. 581, p. np.

The criticism that utilitarianism has no place for rights must be responded to for the sake of completeness (and in an attempt to further redeem utilitarianism). Rights do in fact have a place in a utilitarian ethic, and, what is more, it is only against this background that rights can be explained and their source justified. Utilitarianism provides a sounder foundation for rights than any other competing theory. Indeed, for the utilitarian, the answer to why rights exist is simple: recognition of them best promotes general utility. Their origin accordingly lies in the pursuit of happiness. Their content is discovered through empirical observations regarding the patterns of behavior that best advance the utilitarian cause.
2. CONSEQUENTIALIST THEORIES ARE JUSTIFIED BECAUSE THEY SAVE THE MOST LIVES

David Wasserman and Alan Strudler the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, 2003.

“Can a Nonconsequentialist Count Lives?,” PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, 31.1, p. 72.

In making choices about saving people from death, what moral significance should attach to the fact that one choice involves saving more people than another? Consequentialists typically have an easy time with such questions because they believe that the morally best choice produces the best consequences and that, other things being equal, more lives saved is a better consequence than fewer lives saved. The consequentialist position involves what might be called the compensation assumption: the proposition that other things equal, the gain that comes from saving a larger group of people somehow more than compensates for the loss that occurs by not saving some other, smaller group of people.

3. RESOLVING UNCERTAINTY OF CONSEQUENCES IS CRUCIAL TO AVOID EXTINCTION

Jonathan Schell, the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale, 2000.

THE FATE OF THE EARTH, p. 94.

At just what point the species crossed, or will have crossed, the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to destroy itself and actually having the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any second, is not precisely knowable. But it is clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the zone of risk of extinction.

4. ONLY A UTILITARIAN VIEW CAN ACCOUNT FOR THE GOOD OF SOCIETY

Thomas Hurka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, December 7, 2006.

“Normative Ethics: Back To The Future,” Accessed 12-14-2008, .

Perhaps that analysis requires a more subtle application of the principle of organic unities than has yet been considered; perhaps it is simply not possible. Even so, the identification of the two distinctions has greatly improved our understanding of this family of views. There have also been subtle suggestions about how a deontological view can weigh its prohibitions against the overall good an action will cause without aggregating that good in a simple additive way. Thus, the view can make it permissible to kill one innocent person to save some large number of other people from being killed or otherwise seriously harmed, but not to save any number of people from mild headaches.

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