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UTILITARIANISM/CONSEQUENTIALISM IS A POOR STANDARD FOR MORALITY
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- UTILITARIAN SURVIVAL POLITICS DESTROY THE VALUE TO LIFE
UTILITARIANISM/CONSEQUENTIALISM IS A POOR STANDARD FOR MORALITY1. UTILITARIANISM CAN BE USED TO JUSTIFY PRIVILEGING THE FEW OVER THE MANY Robert W. McGee, Director, Center for Accounting, Auditing and Tax Studies at Florida International University, November 20, 2008.
One criticism of utilitarian ethics is that the greatest good might be served by having a few individuals benefit a lot while the vast majority is harmed just a little. This is the argument used to justify protectionism of various industries that are facing the heat of foreign competition. Maybe the general public will have to spend an extra five dollars for a shirt, but 50,000 jobs will be saved in the textile industry by protecting it from foreign competition. So a small minority, the 50,000 workers whose jobs will be saved, will benefit, while a hundred million or more consumers of shirts will suffer just a little, perhaps not enough to even notice. 2. THE ULTILITARIAN QUEST TO AVOID DEATH DEMANDS THE SLAUGHTER OF “ENEMIES” Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law at Purdue University, September 1999. “Death, The Herd and Human Survival,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WORLD PEACE, No. 3, Vol. 16, 3-26.
Richard Norman, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, 1995. Ethics, Killing, and War, p. 207. Since the waging of war almost invariably involves the deliberate taking of life on a massive scale, it will be immensely difficult to justify. I have argued that utilitarian justifications are not good enough. We cannot justify the taking of life simply by saying that the refusal to take life is likely to lead to worse consequences. An adequate notion of moral responsibility implies that other people's responsibility for evil does not necessarily justify us is doing evil ourselves in order to prevent them. We cannot sacrifice some of our people for the others and claim that we are justified by a utilitarian calculus of lives. 4. UTILITARIANISM JUSTIFIES DENYING PROPERTY RIGHTS IN FAVOR OF STALINISM Robert W. McGee, Director, Center for Accounting, Auditing and Tax Studies at Florida International University, November 20, 2008. “An Ethical Analysis of Corporate Bailouts,” SSRN Working Paper, Accessed 12-11-2008, The worst flaw in any utilitarian analysis is the total disregard of property and contract rights. For a utilitarian, all that matters is whether the result is a positive-sum game or a negative-sum game. If a few heads have to be broken to achieve the desired result, then a few heads will have to be broken. Or, to paraphrase Stalin, if one wants to make an omelet, one must break a few eggs. UTILITARIAN SURVIVAL POLITICS DESTROY THE VALUE TO LIFE1. FOCUSING ON SURVIVAL CAN BECOME A DISEASE THAT SACRIFICES ALL OTHER VALUES Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973. THE TYRANNY OF SURVIVAL, p. 93. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing.
J. Charles King, Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College, 1984. THE PHILOSOPHIC THOUGHT OF AYN RAND, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, eds., p.110. Once one sees it is the possibility of desiring that is crucial for a being to be able to value, then one sees that, while life may be one among other values a being holds, it need have no privileged place. Of course, to most of us life is very high on our ordering of preferences and is, indeed, among the various things we want for their own sakes. But history records many individuals who, even if they could have continued to live what might be called a rational existence in Rand's terms, would nevertheless have preferred to sacrifice their own life to bring about some greater value. The point of this is simply that value finds its beginning in desire, not merely in the process of life that in our experience gives rise to desire. Desire enables one to value even things that transcend, in one way or another, one's own span of life. 3. EXTINCTION IS MORE LIKELY IN A WORLD OF POLICYMAKING DEVOID OF MORALITY Henry Shue, Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Princeton University, 1989. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND MORAL RESTRAINT, p. 45. How one judges the issue of ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks "what is worth a billion lives (or the survival of the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, "is it possible to imagine any threat to our civilization and values that would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten thousand to one in a thousand for a specific period?" Then there are several plausible answers, including a democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival. 4. THE UTILITARIAN QUEST FOR SURVIVAL SACRIFICES EVERYTHING ABOUT MORALITY Daniel Callahan, Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973. THE TYRANNY OF SURVIVAL, p. 93. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Download 343.42 Kb. Share with your friends:
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