BEST UTIL AND DEON CARDS

Goodin:
1


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.

Cummiskey writes
2
:

According to Kant, the objective end of moral action is the existence of rational beings. Respect for
rational beings requires that in deciding what to do, one must give appropriate practical
consideration to the unconditional value of rational beings and to the conditional value of happiness. Since agent-centered
constraints require a non-value-based rationale, the most natural interpretation of the demand that one give equal
respect to all rational beings leads to a consequentialist normative theory. We have seen that there is no
sound Kantian reason for abandoning this natural consequentialist interpretation. In particular, a consequentialist interpretation does not require
sacrifices that a Kantian ought to consider unreasonable, and it does not involve doing evil so that good may come of it. It simply requires an
uncompromising commitment to the equal value and equal claims of all rational beings and
a recognition that in the moral consideration of conduct, one's own subjective concerns do
not have overriding importance.


1
Robert E., Cambridge University Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63
2
David Cummiskey, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Bates College. Kantian Consequentialism. 1996.

Governments must weigh consequences
Harries, editor and founder of National Interest, Senior Fellow at Centre for Independent Studies,
94
(Owen Harries, editor and founder of National Interest, Senior Fellow at Centre for Independent
Studies, Spring 1993/1994, Power and Civilization, The National I nterest)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, In principle, do you believe in one standard of human
rights and free expression?, Lee immediately answers, Look, it is not a matter of principle but of practice. This might
appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation
of the fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in politics, it is the ethic of responsibility rather
than the ethic of absolute ends that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat
human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost, governments must always weigh
consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once they enter the realm of
politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests, including such basic
things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will vary with
circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them always at the top
and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of implementing and promoting them will always have to
be considered.


BEST DEON CARDS

The quest for survival destroys all human values
Callahan, director of The Hastings Institute, 73
Daniel Callahan, Co-founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy
from Harvard University, The Tyranny of Survival 1973, p 91-93

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 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 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 made to ensure that survival. It would be the
Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats
if, because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they
succeeded in not doing so.

Utilitarian thinking results in mass murder
Cleveland Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland 2002 Paul
A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The
Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise,
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)

A final problem with utilitarianism that ought to be mentioned is that it is subject
to being criticized because of a potential fallacy of composition. The common good
is not necessarily the sum of the interests of individuals. In their book, A History of
Economic Theory and Method, Ekelund and Hebert provide a well-conceived
example to demonstrate this problem. They write: It is presumably in the general
interest of American society to have every automobile in the United States
equipped with all possible safety devices. However, a majority of individual car
buyers may not be willing to pay the cost of such equipment in the form of higher
auto prices. In this case, the collective interest does not coincide with the sum of the
individual interests. The result is a legislative and economic dilemma. Indeed,
individuals prone to political action, and held under the sway of utilitarian ethics, will
likely be willing to decide in favor of the supposed collective interest over and against
that of the individual. But then, what happens to individual human rights? Are they not
sacrificed and set aside as unimportant? In fact, this is precisely what has happened. In
democratic countries the destruction of human liberty that has taken place in the
past hundred years has occurred primarily for this reason. In addition, such
thinking largely served as the justification for the mass murders of millions of innocent
people in communist countries where the leaders sought to establish the workers
paradise. To put the matter simply, utilitarianism offers no cohesive way to discern
between the various factions competing against one another in political debates and thus
fails to provide an adequate guide for ethical human action. The failure of
utilitarianism at this point is extremely important for a whole host of policy issues.
Among them, the issue of the governments provision of public goods is worth our
consideration.

Utilitarianism takes away all value to live
Cleveland Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland 2002 Paul
A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The
Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise,
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)

Another problem with utilitarianism is that it has a very narrow conception of what it
means to be a human being. Within Benthams view, human beings are essentially
understood to be passive creatures who respond to the environment in a purely
mechanical fashion. As such, there are no bad motives, only bad calculations. In
these terms, no person is responsible for his or her own behavior. In effect, the idea
being promoted is that human action is essentially the same as that of a machine in
operation. This notion reduces a human thought to nothing more than a series of
bio-chemical reactions. Yet, if this is true, then there is no meaning to human thought
or human action and all human reason is reduced to the point of being meaningless.
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