Utilitarianism and War

Introduction

War and violence have bedeviled humanity throughout recorded history. While Rousseau posited a noble savage and Marxian socialists have forecast human perfectibility, Saint Augustine and succeeding generations of Catholic and Protestant thinkers have asserted the principle of original sin.

For utilitarians, rightness and wrongness turn on the specific, comparative consequences of the various courses of action available to us. Without knowing something about the particular situation, we cannot judge ahead of time whether acting in a certain way will be right or wrong. We cannot say that actions of a certain type will always be right or always wrong. Utilitarians see this flexibility as a strong point of their normative standard, but their critics view it as a fatal flaw: The utilitarian goal of maximizing welfare, they argue, can sometimes necessitate the agent's acting immorally. The critics concede that it generally conduces to total well-being for people to tell the truth, keep their promises, and refrain from killing or injuring other people, from damaging their property, or from violating their rights. But there can be exceptions, and in unusual circumstances, promoting overall welfare might call for the agent to do something normally considered perfectly immoral—for example, supporting slavery, violating someone's rights, or framing an innocent person for a crime (Frankena, 10). Many philosophers repudiate utilitarianism because of this possibility.

Discussion

Utilitarians typically respond by arguing that their theory does not mandate the conduct the critic says it does. Faced with hypothetical examples of detestable actions, policies, or institutions that supposedly maximize well-being, they challenge the imagined facts, arguing, for example, that slavery will not in fact promote overall well-being or that abridging someone's right to free speech to pacify the majority or torturing suspects to obtain confessions will have negative longterm repercussions. And even if it really would maximize well-being, say, to frame an innocent person to forestall a riot, one could never judge with sufficient confidence that this is how things would play out (Mill, 52). In response, the critic is unlikely to permit the hypothesized facts to be challenged but, rather, to insist that in the imagined circumstances we really do know that an action or policy we normally consider morally wrong will maximize total welfare. At this point, utilitarians have no choice but to concede that the apparently immoral thing really is the right course of action. But they will deny that this fact provides a compelling reason for rejecting their theory. Ordinary morality is not sacrosanct. If its rules sometimes conflict with utilitarianism, then so much the worse for ordinary morality. We should revise it, not abandon utilitarianism (Schneewind, 65).

Immanuel Kant thought the human mind capable of discerning moral duties or categorical imperatives through the application of reason. Because reason is an inherent human capacity, the perception of duty is embedded in human nature. This does not mean that humans will always do that which is good. Their capacity to reason provides the opportunity to make choices, and these choices may reflect selfish interests and violate ...