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 Ann (main path) |
 Fred |
 Vera |
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| Utilitarianism |
| Dee
Speaking
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 I think there are basic problems with utilitarianism as a moral theory. Although I disagree with Rawls on the nature of rights, I think he is right on the mark in criticizing utilitarianism.Utilitarianism makes a certain amount of sense as a way for an individual person to make decisions. An individual might make various tradeoffs to maximize certain long-term goals. That's fine. But society is not an individual, it's a group of individuals with complicated relationships. The only tradeoffs that the government can make involve separate individuals. It cannot decide that some one composite individual called society will have less of X in order to have more of Y. It can only decide that person A will have less of X in order that persons B and C will have more of Y. The analogy with the individual breaks down and we begin to see how morally dangerous it really is. Another way of putting this is to say that utilitarianism treats people as a means to an end. But as Immanuel Kant stressed, people are (or should be seen as) ends in themselves and not simply the means to some goal. There is a passage in which Rawls says that utilitarianism does not take the difference between people seriously. I agree. For utilitarianism, people are simply containers that happen to hold happiness or satisfaction or whatever counts as the good. Since utilitarianism seeks to maximize the good, it really doesn’t matter where it is -- in other words, it doesn’t matter how much is in this container or how much is in that container. All that matters is how much goodness we create. |
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