Justicized Consequentialism: Prioritizing the Right or the Good?
- PDF / 185,521 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 68 Downloads / 191 Views
Justicized Consequentialism: Prioritizing the Right or the Good? Simon Wigley
Published online: 10 March 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
One of the standard objections to classical utilitarianism is that it permits harmdoing that we find intuitively unacceptable. It appears to mandate, for example, the framing of an innocent person for murder if her suffering is outweighed by the satiation of the population’s craving for retribution. It is usually argued that utilitarianism produces these counter-intuitive conclusions because it is, at best, only indirectly concerned with the way in which total welfare is distributed between individuals. As a result it treats the target population as if it were one individual aiming to maximize her welfare. That is, utilitarianism fails to differentiate between sacrificing some individuals in order to maximize welfare for a population and a particular individual choosing to make a sacrifice in order to maximize her personal welfare. In sum utilitarianism is accused of permitting counter-intuitive conclusions and of failing to take seriously the separateness between persons.1 Henceforward, these two closely related charges will be referred to as the objection from justice. In response a number of philosophers have argued that traditional actutilitarianism is only vulnerable to the objection from justice because it adheres to a theory of the good which ignores non-welfarist sources of intrinsic value such as justice.2 According to that proposal intrinsic value is produced both by welfare 1
For the classic statement of the latter challenge see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999/1971), pp. 19–26.
2
See Amartya Sen, ‘‘Rights and Agency,’’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1982); David Sosa, ‘‘Consequences of Consequentialism,’’ Mind, Vol. 102, No. 405 (1993); John Broome. Weighing Goods: Equality, Uncertainty and Time (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995); Fred Feldman, ‘‘Adjusting Utility for Justice: A Consequentialist Reply to the Objection from Justice,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LV, No. (3) (1995); Fred Feldman, ‘‘Justice, Desert and the Repugnant Conclusion,’’ Utilitas, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1995) and Douglas W. Portmore, ‘‘Can an Act-Consequentialist Theory Be Agent Relative?’’ American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2001). S. Wigley (&) Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University, 06800 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/*wigley/
123
468
S. Wigley
and by the distribution of welfare according to justice. The idea of attributing intrinsic value to justice, and desert in particular, is by no means a new one. Franz Brentano, G.E. Moore and W.D. Ross all argued that hedonic receipt and the extent to which hedonic receipt matches deservingness partly determines the total intrinsic value in the world.3 An important upshot of pluralizing intrinsic value in this way is that justice is not valued simply becaus
Data Loading...
