Util and Deontology - Gonzaga 2013

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013Lundeen/Pointer/Spraker

Deontology Good


Consequentialism Kills VTL

Consequential framework destroys intrinsic value to life- they reduce human life to a calculable object.Grisez, professor of Christian ethics @ Mount Saint Mary’s College and Shaw, Director of public information at Knights of Columbus, 94(Germain and Russell, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 25-26)

If there are no ethical absolutes, human persons, rather than being¶ the norm and source from which other things receive their value,¶ become simply items or commodities with a relative value-- inviolable¶ only up to the point at which it is expedient to violate them in order to¶ achieve an objective. It would then make no sense at all to speak of¶ the immeasurable value of the human person from being. Far from being immeasurable—that is, ¶ beyond calculation—the value of a person would be quite specific and quantifiable, something to be weighed in the balance¶ against other values.

Utilitarianism destroys human dignity - Treats people as means to an endGrisez, professor of Christian ethics @ Mount Saint Mary’s College and Shaw, Director of public information at Knights of Columbus, 94(Germain Gabriel and Russell, Beyond the New Morality: The Responsibilities of Freedom p 28)

One arrives at a different judgment of how one ought to proceed in such circumstances if human life is regarded, not as one of the things of relative value which a person has, but as an intrinsic component of the person, and so as a value which shares in the dignity of the person. In denying that we can choose to kill one person for the sake of two, we really are denying that two persons are "worth" twice as much as some other real person. On this view it is simply not possible to make the sort of calculation which weighs persons against each other (my life is more valuable than John's life, John's life is more valuable than Mary's and Tom's combined, or vice versa) and thus to determine whose life shall be respected and whose sacrificed. The value of each human person is incalculable, not in any merely poetic sense, but simply because it is not susceptible to calculation, measurement, weighing, and balancing. Traditionally this point has been expressed by the statement that the end does not justify the means. This is a way of saying that the direct violation of any good intrinsic to the person cannot be justified by the good result which such a violation may bring about. What is extrinsic to human persons may be used for the good of persons, but what is intrinsic to persons has a kind of sacredness and may not be violated.


Utilitarianism Justifies Atrocities

Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves – utilitarianism justifies any atrocity.Anderson, National Director of Probe Ministries International 2004 (Kerby, “Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number” http://www.probe.org/theology-and-philosophy/worldview--philosophy/utilitarianism-the-greatest-good-for-thegreatest-number.html)

One problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to an "end justifies the means" mentality. If any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, a true ethical foundation is lost. But we all know that the end does not justify the means. If that were so, then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because the end was to purify the human race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of millions because he was trying to achieve a communist utopia. The end never justifies the means. The means must justify themselves. A particular act cannot be judged as good simply because it may lead to a good consequence. The means must be judged by some objective and consistent standard of morality. Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities if the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number. Americans in the eighteenth century could justify slavery on the basis that it provided a good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much worse. A third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If morality is based on results, then we would have to have omniscience in order to accurately predict the consequence of any action. But at best we can only guess at the future, and often these educated guesses are wrong. A fourth problem with utilitarianism is that consequences themselves must be judged. When results occur, we must still ask whether they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism provides no objective and consistent foundation to judge results because results are the mechanism used to judge the action itself.inviolability is intrinsically valuable.

Without absolute side constraints against violating human dignity, utilitarianism becomes a justification for slavery, torture, and murder.Clifford, Professor of Philosophy @ Mississippi State University, 11[Michael, Spring, “MORAL LITERACY”, Volume 11, Issue 2, https://webprod1.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Clifford_Moral_Literacy.pdf, Accessed 7-6-13, ABS]

Whether or not you believe in individual rights, whether or not you are convinced by arguments one way or another about the metaphysical grounds of rights, we can all appreciate the idea that any ethics should recognize the fundamental dignity of human beings. This is precisely what worries critics of utilitarianism, that it may require us to violate that dignity, for some at least, if doing so will promote the greatest happiness. But to violate

human dignity is to ignore or to misunderstand the very point of ethics. For the deontologist, such as Kant, we have a duty not to violate human dignity, even if it causes us pain, even if the consequences fail to maximize the overall happiness. The inviolate character of human dignity is expressed most practically by the idea that we have certain basic rights (whatever the source of rights are, whether natural or by convention). John Locke defined rights as “prima facie entitlements,” which means that anyone who would restrict my rights bears the burden of proving that there are good reasons for doing so. For example, the right to private property is sometimes trumped by the principle of eminent domain, provided that I too stand to

gain by seizure of my land. My right to free speech is limited by the harm it might cause by, say, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. There are times when we feel justified in limiting or abrogating certain positive rights for the common good, but even here no social outcome justifies torture, slavery, murder, or any action which violates my

https://webprod1.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Clifford_Moral_Literacy.pdf


fundamental human dignity. Deontological ethics assumes there to be a line that cannot be crossed, regardless of the consequences.

Utilitarianism can be manipulated to justify any atrocity – their framework condones mass slaughter. Holt, commentator for the BBC, writes frequently about politics and philosophy 1995(Jim, New York Times, “Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic,” August 5, p. Lexis)

Can the deliberate massacre of innocent people ever be condoned? The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 to 250,000 Japanese by incineration and radiation poisoning. Although a small fraction of the victims were soldiers, the great majority were noncombatants -- women, children, the aged. Among the justifications that have been put forward for President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb, only one is worth taking seriously -- that it saved lives. The alternative, the reasoning goes, was to launch an invasion. Truman claimed in his memoirs that this would have cost another half a million American lives. Winston Churchill put the figure at a million. Revisionist historians have cast doubt on such numbers. Wartime documents suggest that military planners expected around 50,000 American combat deaths in an invasion. Still, when Japanese casualties, military and civilian, are taken into account, the overall invasion death toll on both sides would surely have ended up surpassing that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars will continue to argue over whether there were other, less catastrophic ways to force Tokyo to surrender. But given the fierce obstinacy of the Japanese militarists, Truman and his advisers had some grounds for believing that nothing short of a full-scale invasion or the annihilation of a big city with an apocalyptic new weapon would have succeeded. Suppose they were right. Would this prospect have justified the intentional mass killing of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the debate over the question, participants on both sides have been playing the numbers game. Estimate the hypothetical number of lives saved by the bombings, then add up the actual lives lost. If the first number exceeds the second, then Truman did the right thing; if the reverse, it was wrong to have dropped the bombs. That is one approach to the matter -- the utilitarian approach. According to utilitarianism, a form of moral reasoning that arose in the 19th century, the goodness or evil of an action is determined solely by its consequences. If somehow you can save 10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead and boil that baby. There is, however, an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes a quite different view. The gist of it is expressed by St. Paul’s condemnation of those who say, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” Some actions, this tradition holds, can never be justified by their consequences; they are absolutely forbidden. It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby. Applying this absolutist morality to war can be tricky. When enemy soldiers are trying to enslave or kill us, the principle of self-defense permits us to kill them (though not to slaughter them once they are taken prisoner). But what of those who back them? During World War II, propagandists made much of the “indivisibility” of modern warfare: the idea was that since the enemy nation’s entire economic and social strength was deployed behind its military forces, the whole population was a legitimate target for obliteration. “There are no civilians in Japan,” declared an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force shortly before the Hiroshima bombing, a time when the Japanese were popularly depicted as vermin worthy of extermination. The boundary between combatant and noncombatant can be fuzzy, but the distinction is not meaningless, as the case of small children makes clear. Yet is wartime killing of those who are not trying to harm us always tantamount to murder? When naval dockyards, munitions factories and supply lines are bombed, civilian carnage is inevitable. The absolutist moral tradition acknowledges this by a principle known as double effect: although it is always wrong to kill innocents deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some noncombatants will die as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is


lying ill. It does not, however, apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Transformed into hostages by the technology of aerial bombardment, the people of those cities were intentionally executed en masse to send a message of terror to the rulers of Japan. The practice of ordering the massacre of civilians to bring the enemy to heel scarcely began with Truman. Nor did the bomb result in casualties of a new order of magnitude. The earlier bombing of Tokyo by incendiary weapons killed some 100,000 people. What Hiroshima and Nagasaki did mark, by the unprecedented need for rationalization they presented, was the triumph of utilitarian thinking in the conduct of war. The conventional code of noncombatant immunity -- a product of several centuries of ethical progress among nations, which had been formalized by an international commission in the 1920’s in the Hague -- was swept away. A simpler axiom took its place: since war is hell, any means necessary may be used to end, in Churchill’s words, “the vast indefinite butchery.” It is a moral calculus that, for all its logical consistency, offends our deep-seated intuitions about the sanctity of life -- our conviction that a person is always to be treated as an end, never as a means. Left up to the warmakers, moreover, utilitarian calculations are susceptible to bad-faith reasoning: tinker with the numbers enough and virtually any atrocity can be excused in the national interest. In January, the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where mass slaughter was committed as an end in itself -- the ultimate evil. The moral nature of Hiroshima is ambiguous by contrast. Yet in the postwar era, when governments do not hesitate to treat the massacre of civilians as just another strategic option, the bomb’s sinister legacy is plain: it has inured us to the idea of reducing innocents to instruments and morality to arithmetic.


Side Constraints

Even if we should evaluate consequences, there should be absolute side constraints on deliberately harming innocent people. Fried, Professor of law @ Harvard, 94(Charles, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 74)The opposing conception of right and wrong, the conception that there are some things we must not do no matter what good we hope to accomplish, has always stood as a provocation and a scandal to consequentialism. If a state of the world is the best possible state and we bring it about at the least possible cost, what else can matter? Yet the opposing conception (the deontological) holds that how one achieves one's goals has a moral significance which is not subsumed in¶ the importance and magnitude of the goals. Whether we get to the¶ desired end state by deliberately hurting innocent people, by violating their rights, by lies and violence, is intensely important. And yet the deontologist does not deny that states of the world are sources of value and even agrees that the good inherent in states of the world (including¶ our own states of mind) is the only good. If a happy state of the world existed that had been brought about through wrong and violation of right, and if those wrongs could no longer be righted, there is nothing that says that this happiness would not count as real happiness and should not be enjoyed; still, if this happiness had been ours to choose only by wrongful means, we would have had to wave it away. We would have to wave it away because right and wrong are the foundations of our moral personality. We choose our goods, but if what we choose is to have value as a good, then the entity doing the choosing must have value, and the process of choice must be such that what¶ comes out of it has value. In the view I shall elaborate, right and wrong have an independent and overriding status because they establish our basic position as freely choosing entities. That is why nothing we choose can be more important than the ground'—right and wrong—for our choosing. Right and wrong are the expressions of respect for persons—respect for others and self-respect.

You should never commit a sure evil to avoid a possible one- consequentialist logic can be manipulated, and other actions can be taken to mitigate or avoid their disads. Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy @ The University of Chicago, 84(Alan, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 138-139)

6. There is, however, another side to this story. What of the thousands of innocent persons in the distant city whose lives are imperilled by the threatened nuclear explosion? Don't they too have rights to life which, because of their numbers, are far superior to the mother's right? May they not contend that while it is all very well for Abrams to preserve his moral purity by not killing his mother, he has no right to purchase this at the expense of their lives, thereby treating them as mere means to his ends and violating their own rights? Thus it may be argued that the morally correct description of the alternative confront- ing Abrams is not simply that it is one of not violating or violating an innocent person's right to life, but rather not violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby violating the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons through being partly responsible for their deaths, or violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby protecting or fulfilling the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons. We have here a tragic conflict of rights and an illustration of the heavy price exacted by moral absolutism. The aggregative consequentialist who holds that that action ought always to be performed which maximizes utility or minimizes disutility would maintain that in such a situation the lives of the thousands must be preferred.¶ An initial answer may be that terrorists who make such


demands and issue such threats cannot be trusted to keep their word not to drop the bombs if the mother is tortured to death; and even if they now do keep their word, acceding in this case would only lead to further escalated demands and threats. It may also be argued that it is¶ irrational to perpetrate a sure evil in order to forestall what is so far only a possible or threatened evil. Philippa Foot has sagely commented on cases of this sort that if it is the son's duty to kill his mother in order to save the lives of the many other innocent residents of the city, then "anyone who wants us to do something we think wrong has only to threaten that otherwise he himself will do something we think worse".8 Much depends, however, on the nature of the "wrong" and the "worse". If someone threatens to commit suicide or to kill innocent hostages if we do not break our promise to do some relatively unimportant action, breaking the promise would be the obviously right course, by the criterion of degrees of necessity for action. The special difficulty of the present case stems from the fact that the conflicting rights are of the same supreme degree of importance.¶ It may be contended, however, that this whole answer, focusing on the probable outcome of obeying the terrorists' demands, is a consequentialist argument and, as such, is not available to the absolutist who insists that Abrams must not torture his mother to death whatever the consequences.9 This contention imputes to the absolutist a kind of indifference or even callousness to the sufferings of others that is not warranted by a correct understanding of his position. He can be concerned about consequences so long as he does not regard them as possibly superseding or diminishing the right and duty he regards as absolute. It is a matter of priorities. So long as the mother's right not to be tortured to death by her son is unqualifiedly respected, the absolutist can seek ways to mitigate the threatened disastrous consequences and possibly to avert them altogether. A parallel case is found in the theory of legal punishment: the retributivist, while asserting that punishment must be meted out only to the persons who deserve it because of the crimes they have committed, may also uphold punishment for its deterrent effect so long as the latter, consequentialist consideration is subordinated to and limited by the conditions of the former, antecedentalist consideration.' Thus the absolutist can accommodate at least part of the consequentialist's substantive concerns within the limits of his own principle.


Intervening Action

The principle of intervening action means we aren’t morally culpable for the reaction or backlash of other parties.Alan Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy @ The University of Chicago, 1982 (“Human Rights: Essay on Justification and Application.” Pg. 230)

The required supplement is provided by the principle of intervening action. According to this principle, when there is a casual connection between some person A’s performing some action (or inaction) X and some other person C’s incurring a certain harm Z, A’s moral responsibility for Z is removed if, between X and Z, there intervenes some other action Y of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness. The reason for this removal is that B’s intervening action Y is more direct of proximate cause of Z and, unlike A’s action (or inaction), Y is the sufficient condition of Z as it actually occurs. An example of this principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly told that because he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were shaking the American Republic to its foundations. By the principle of intervening action, however, it was King’s opponents who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and injuries. King might also have replied that the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the other Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks.


Critical Consequentialism

You should adopt critical consequentialism- examine every possible alternative before taking unethical action. This is the only way to avoid atrocities.Blum, Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard, 2008

[Gabriella, “The Laws of War and the ‘Lesser Evil,’” Harvard Law School Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 24,http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard/faculty/papers/24, Accessed 7/11/13]

To be truly justified, a net utilitarian calculation is insufficient; the¶ actor, instead, must be able to show that she had chosen the least possible¶ harmful mean that could avert the greater evil, without jeopardizing the¶ success of the military mission. This further condition is intended to¶ supplement the causal connection between the violation and the aversion of¶ harm and to ensure that the lesser evil justification is not used to mask¶ unnecessary atrocities.¶ The domestic necessity defense does not require this condition; instead,¶ it offers only a vague proportionality test. The joint necessity-duress clause¶ in the ICC Rome Statute includes a similarly broader test, namely that “the¶ person acts necessarily and reasonably to avoid this threat.” Both the¶ domestic necessity and the ICC necessity operate only when the defendant¶ has acted against an imminent threat. But where a government chooses in an¶ non-imminent, premeditated decision to break the law, it supposedly can¶ and should assess the full ramifications of the violation, including by¶ considering less harmful means, whether legal or illegal themselves.¶ In the Early Warning case, the High Court of Justice addressed the¶ possible use of loudspeakers as an alternative to the reliance on civilians.¶ The IDF’s position, to recall, was that the use of loudspeakers would call¶ attention to the forces operating, thereby increasing the risk of all-round¶

escalation. It is unclear to what extent this alternative affected the final¶ decision of the judges, and whether the Court ultimately struck down the¶ procedure despite deferring to the IDF’s judgment on this particular issue.¶ The use of torture, so it is commonly agreed by those who are willing to¶ accept it as necessary under certain circumstances, must be restricted to¶ those cases where a similar outcome could not be achieved by any other¶ means. Consequently, if any less harmful measure (for instance, detention,¶ the taking of hostages, or even the threat of using torture) would have had a¶ similar probability of success, torture would be unjustifiable.¶ This requirement would also exclude certain atrocities from¶ consideration under the humanitarian necessity paradigm altogether.¶ Consider, for instance, the crime of rape: It is impossible to imagine any¶ scenario in which the raping of an individual would be the least harmful¶ way to achieve a certain goal. If anything less than killing is possible, there¶ must be a range of less harmful means to avert the harm the infliction of¶ which is allowed under the law.¶ The less harmful means requirement casts the largest shadow over the¶ attacks on Hiroshima, and particularly, Nagasaki. Was it indeed impossible¶ to avert Operation Downfall by using less disastrous means? Or were some¶ scientists, who argued that inviting UN representatives for a live¶ demonstration of the explosion in the desert, correct in arguing that this¶ option had to be tried out first, before dropping the bomb on densely¶ populated cities? Does the insistence of the Emperor on conditional¶

surrender even after the widespread firebombing of Tokyo and the invasion¶ of Okinawa prove that there were no other options? Did the conditions set¶ by the Emperor warrant the continuation of the war? Could the use of¶ nuclear weapons ever be justified under the “least harmful requirement”¶

condition?

http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard/faculty/papers/24


AT: Extinction Outweighs


Extinction Images = Overestimate Risk

Their understanding of extinction scenarios is flawed. They are only evaluating the images that extinction evokes, not the probability of its occurrence.Yudkowsky ‘6 (Eliezer; Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks” Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic 8/31/06)

In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to existential risks. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people. 107 is the order of the largest

catastrophes in humanity's written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking - enter into a "separate magisterium". People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an

existential risk, and say, "Well, maybe the human species doesn't really deserve to survive."There is a saying in heuristics and biases that people do not evaluate events, but descriptions of events - what is called non-extensional reasoning. The extension of humanity's extinction includes the death of yourself, of your friends, of your family, of your loved ones, of your city, of your country, of your political fellows. Yet people who would take great offense at a proposal to wipe the country of Britain from the map, to kill every member of the Democratic Party in the U.S., to turn the city of Paris to glass - who would feel still greater horror on hearing the doctor say that their child

had cancer - these people will discuss the extinction of humanity with perfect calm. "Extinction of humanity", as words on paper, appears in fictional novels, or is discussed in philosophy books - it belongs to a different context than the Spanish flu. We evaluate descriptions of events, not extensions of events. The cliché phrase end of the world invokes the magisterium of myth and dream, of prophecy and apocalypse, of novels and movies. The challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the catastrophes being so huge, people snap into a different mode of thinking. Human deaths are suddenly no longer bad, and detailed predictions suddenly no longer require any expertise, and whether the story is told with a happy ending or a sad ending is a matter of personal taste in stories.


Tyranny of Survival

Sole focus on survival destroys value to life and is always used to justify the worst atrocities.Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973 (Daniel, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all

manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades, fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese Americans were herded, without due process of law, into detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in a general consensus that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly

unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimizations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposed a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has been one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival, the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evokes as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B.F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jaques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow

almost all known religious, ethical, and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and beating children. Some have suggested we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life and thus procreate more diabetics. In the field

of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to

survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to starving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies For all these reasons, it is possible

to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for the sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland, to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at 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 of survival as a 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. 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 make to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.


Hunger Outweighs Extinction

We have a moral obligation to distribute food equally even if that leads to extinction.Watson, Professor of Philosophy @ Washington University, 77 (Richard, World Hunger and Moral Obligation, p. 118-119)

These arguments are morally spurious. That food sufficient for well-nourished survival is the equal right of every human individual or nation is a specification of the higher principle that everyone has equal right to the necessities of life. The moral stress of the principle of equity is primarily on equal sharing, and only secondarily on what is being

shared. The higher moral principle is of human equity per se. Consequently, the moral action is to distribute all food equally, whatever the consequences. This is the hard line apparently drawn by such moralists as Immanuel Kant and

Noam Chomsky—but then, morality is hard. The conclusion may be unreasonable (impractical and irrational in

conventional terms), but it is obviously moral. Nor should anyone purport surprise; it has always been understood that the claims of morality—if taken seriously—supersede those of conflicting reason. One may even have to sacrifice one’s life or one’s nation to be moral in situations where practical behavior would preserve it. For example, if a prisoner of war undergoing torture is to be a (perhaps dead) patriot even when reason tells him that collaboration will hurt no one, he remains

silent. Similarly, if one is to be moral, one distributes available food in equal shares (even if everyone then dies). That an action is necessary to save one’s life is no excuse for behaving unpatriotically or immorally if one wishes to be a patriot or moral. No principle of morality absolves one of behaving immorally simply to save one’s life or nation. There is a strict analogy here between adhering to moral principles for the sake of being moral, and adhering to Christian principles for the sake of being Christian. The moral world contains pits and

lions, but one looks always to the highest light. The ultimate test always harks to the highest principle—recant or die—and it is pathetic to profess morality if one quits when the going gets rough. I have put aside many questions of detail—such as the mechanical problems of distributing food—because detail does not alter the stark conclusion. If every human life is equal in value, then the equal distribution of the necessities of life is an extremely high, if not the highest, moral duty. It is at least high enough to override the excuse that by doing it one would lose one’s life. But many people cannot accept the view that one must distribute equally even in f the nation

collapses or all people die. If everyone dies, then there will be no realm of morality. Practically speaking, sheer survival

comes first. One can adhere to the principle of equity only if one exists. So it is rational to suppose that the principle of survival is morally higher than the principle of equity. And though one might not be able to argue for unequal distribution of food to save a nation—for nations can come and go—one might well argue that unequal distribution is necessary for the survival of the human species. That is, some large group—say one-third of present world population—should be at least well-nourished for human survival.

However, from an individual standpoint, the human species—like the nation—is of no moral relevance. From a naturalistic standpoint, survival does come first; from a moralistic standpoint—as indicated above—

survival may have to be sacrificed. In the milieu of morality, it is immaterial whether or not the human species survives as a result of individual behavior.


Consequentialism/Util Good


Must Weigh Consequences

Must weigh consequences – their moral tunnel vision is complicit with the evil they criticizeIsaac, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University 2 (Jeffrey C, Dissent Magazine, 49(2), “Ends, Means, and Politics”, Spring, Proquest)

As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

Failing to prevent a horrible outcome is just as bad as causing it – the aff is moral evasion. Nielsen, philosophy prof @ U of Calgary - 93(Kai, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber, 1993, p. 170-2)

Forget the levity of the example and consider the case of the innocent fat man. If there really is no other way of unsticking our fat man and if plainly, without blasting him out, everyone in the cave will drown, then, innocent or not, he should be blasted out. This indeed overrides the principle that the innocent should never be deliberately killed, but it does not reveal a callousness toward life, for the people involved are caught in a desperate situation in which, if such extreme action is not taken, many lives will be lost and far greater misery will obtain. Moreover, the people who do such a horrible thing or acquiesce in the doing of it are not likely to be rendered more callous about human life and human suffering as a result. Its occurrence will haunt them for the rest of their lives and is as likely as not to make them more rather than less morally sensitive. It is not even correct to say that such a desperate act shows a lack of respect for persons. We are not treating the fat man merely as a means. The fat man's person-his interests and rights are not ignored. Killing him is something which is undertaken with the greatest reluctance. It is only when it is quite certain that there is no other way to save the lives of the others that such a violent course of action is justifiably undertaken. Alan Donagan, arguing rather as Anscombe argues, maintains that "to use any innocent man ill for the sake of some public good is directly to degrade him to being a mere means" and to do this is of course to violate a principle essential to morality, that is, that human beings should never merely be treated as means but should be treated as ends in themselves (as persons worthy of respect)." But, as my above remarks show, it need not be the case, and in the above situation it is not the case, that in killing such an innocent man we are treating him merely as a means. The action is universalizable, all alternative actions which would save his life are duly considered, the blasting out is done only as a last and desperate resort with the minimum of harshness and indifference to his suffering and the like. It indeed sounds ironical to talk this way, given what is done to him. But if such a terrible situation were to arise, there would always be more or less humane ways of going about one's grim task. And in acting in the more humane ways toward the fat man, as we do what we must do and would have done to ourselves were the roles reversed, we show a respect for his person. In so treating the fat man-not just to further the public good but to prevent the certain death of a whole group of people (that is to prevent an even greater evil than his being killed in this way)-the claims of justice are not overriden either, for each individual involved, if he is reasonably correct, should realize that if he were so stuck rather than the


fat man, he should in such situations be blasted out. Thus, there is no question of being unfair. Surely we must choose between evils here, but is there anything more reasonable, more morally appropriate, than choosing the lesser evil when doing or allowing some evil cannot be avoided? That is, where there is no avoiding both and where our actions can determine whether a greater or lesser evil obtains, should we not plainly always opt for the lesser evil? And is it not obviously a greater evil that all those other innocent people should suffer and die than that the fat man should suffer and die? Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns is still more monstrous. The consequentialist is on strong moral ground here, and, if his reflective moral convictions do not square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain reflective particular moral convictions of human beings, so much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could even usefully and relevantly adapt herethough for a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's.

Consequentialism of the kind I have been arguing for provides so persuasive "a theoretical basis for common morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that intuition, not theory, is corrupt."" Given the comprehensiveness, plausibility, and overall rationality of consequentialism, it is not unreasonable to override even a deeply felt moral conviction if it does not square with such a theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered moral convictions, that would be another matter indeed.

Anticonsequentialists often point to the inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent,

but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a

context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion. I say it is evasive

because rather than steeling himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity, he allows, when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times

worse. He tries to keep his `moral purity' and avoid `dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard called `double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally evasive way but this does not make it right.


No Difference between Killing and Letting Die

Utilitarianism is the most ethical option- no difference between killing and letting die.Cummisky, Professor of Philosophy at Bates, 96

(David, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 131)

Finally, even if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot outweigh and compensate for killing one-because dignity cannot be added and summed in this way-this point still does not justify deontological constraints. On the extreme interpretation, why would not killing one person be a stronger obligation than saving two persons? If I am concerned with the priceless dignity of each, it would seem that I may still save two; it is just that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for the loss of one. Consider Hill's example of a priceless object: If I can save two of three priceless statues only by destroying one, then I cannot claim that saving two makes up for the loss of the one. But similarly, the loss of the two is not outweighed by the one that was not destroyed. Indeed, even if dignity cannot be simply summed up, how is the extreme interpretation inconsistent with the idea that I should save as many priceless objects as possible? Even if two do not simply outweigh and thus compensate for the loss of the one, each is priceless; thus, I have good reason to save as many as I can. In short, it is not clear how the extreme interpretation justifies the killing/letting-die distinction or even how it conflicts with the conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved, the better


Policymakers Must Be Utilitarian

In the face of extinction risks, policymakers must be utilitarian.George Kateb, Professor of Politics at Princeton University. 1992 (The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture., Pg.12. )

The main point, however, is that utilitarianism has a necessary pace in any democratic country's normal political deliberations. But its advocates must know its place, which ordinarily is only to help to decide what the theory of rights leaves alone. When may rights be overridden by government? I have two sorts of cases in mind: overriding a particular right of some persons for the sake of preserving the same right of others, and overriding the same right of everyone for the sake of what I will clumsily call "civilization values." An advocate of rights could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the state's overriding of rights for these two reasons. The subject is painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to override is, sacrifice—a right of some so that others may keep it. The situation must be desperate. I have in mind, say, circumstances in which the choice is between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all be lost. The state (or some other agent) may kill some (or allow them to be killed), if the only alternative is letting every-one die. It is the right to life which most prominently figures in thinking about desperate situations. I cannot see any resolution but to heed the precept that "numbers count." Just as one may prefer saving one's own life to saving that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third party—let us say, the state—can (perhaps must) choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either group. That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a third party is right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed.

There’s a distinction between public and private morality – Governments must make utilitarian calculations Goodin, Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University, 95 (Robert E., Cambridge University Press, “Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy” pg 63)

My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and their situations that makes it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, at relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to allow public policy makers to use the utilitarian calculus – if


they want to use it at all – to choose general rules of conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rule. But they cannot be sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion. Their knowledge of generalities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that.

Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are impossible to know, only the outcome mattersHinman, Professor of Ethics, 98 (Lawrence, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, p. 186)

When, for example, we want to assess the moral correctness of proposed governmental legislation, we may well wish to set aside any question of the intentions of the legislators. After all good laws may be passed for the most venal of political motives, and bad legislation may be the outcome of quite good intentions. Instead, we can concentrate solely on the question of what effects the legislation may have on the people. When we make this shift, we are not necessarily denying that individual intentions are important on some level, but rather confining our attention to a level on which those intentions become largely irrelevant. This is particularly appropriate in the case of policy decisions by governments, corporations, or other groups. In such cases there may be a diversity of different intentions that one may want to treat as essentially private matters hwen assessing the moral worth of the proposed law, policy, or action. Therefore, rule utilitarianism's neglect of intentions intuitively makes the most sense when we are assessing the moral worth of some large-scale policy proposed by an entity consisting of more than one individual.


Nuclear War Outweighs

Nuclear war outweighs- survival is a prerequisite to other values.Nye, Professor of Political Science @ Harvard, 86 (Joseph S., Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 45-46)

Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the species? Is not all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we are required to undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not survivors to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral disarmament that forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"?74 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. When we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little else. Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a justifiable topic of both prudential and moral reasoning.

Utilitarianism is the only moral option in a nuclear age.Nye, Professor of political science @ Harvard, 86 (Joseph S., Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 18-19)

The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34 Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions. Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot.


But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists' nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now that it may be literally possible in the nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.

Risk of extinction shatters the framework for evaluating impacts- the impact is infinite and must be avoided at any cost.Schell 82[Jonathan Schell 1982 “Fate of the Earth” pp. 93-96]

To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation – just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use all their weapons, the global effects in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without breaking down catastrophically. These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time we are compelled to admit that there may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global effects, including effects of which we as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and are forced to make our decisions in a state of uncertainty . If we wish to act to save our species, we have to muster our resolve in spite of our awareness that the life of the species may not now in fact be jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore the peril, we have to admit that we do so in the knowledge that the species may be in danger of imminent self-destruction. When the existence of nuclear weapons was made known, thoughtful people everywhere in the world realized that if the great powers entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner or later face the possibility of extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international agreements preventing it an arms race would probably occur. They knew that the path of nuclear armament was a dead end for mankind. The discovery of the energy in mass – of "the basic power of the universe" – and of a means by which man could release that energy altered the relationship between man and the source of his life, the earth. In the shadow of this power, the earth became small and the life of the human species doubtful. In that sense, the question of human extinction has been on the political agenda of the world ever since the first nuclear weapon was detonated, and there was no need for the world to build up its present tremendous arsenals before starting to worry about it. 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.


But the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than that of any other risk and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the framework of life; extinction would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purpose would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risk that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of human history . To employ a mathematician's analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance . Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand before a mystery, and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without delay to withdraw the threat we now post to the world and to ourselves.

Documents

Util and Deontology - Gonzaga 2013