Utilitarianism Bad – Genocide/War/Morals

Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever means will
encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral values
Callahan 73 – Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy from Harvard University (Daniel, “The
Tyranny of Survival”, p 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, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by
the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts
otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism.
Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human
rights. The Vietnamese war has seen 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 evoked 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 Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known
religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful
prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of
survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases
as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even 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 surviving 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 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 survival as 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
single-mindedness 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.
 Utilitarianism Bad – Individuality
Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal inequality by
evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 (Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of
North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp.
313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines the force of any claim that
utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some notion of equal concern and respect for persons . But let us
assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about
political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely
political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just the other way: utilitarianism is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed
to by legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a separate issue] to
assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice.) Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political morality that
utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but
a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior requirement to treat people with equal consideration" (CPP, p. 31)
Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP,
p. 35, emphases added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a universal
point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for example, that equal consideration requires
maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in
more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests
(by for example, determining our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian
principle: equal consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better explication
of equal consideration of each person's interests than is the utilitarian aggregative method, which in effect collapses distinctions
among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals' "interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and
measuring according to intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's
terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the
majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that
requires maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization? Or why
does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that, to say we ought to give equal consideration to everyone's interests
does not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely
formal principle, which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures
maximize is not a "by-product" of equal consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated
into the procedure. That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences, all of
which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the human good: a person's good is
defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical
view, a single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they were his own, sympathetically identifies with them,
and chooses to maximize his "individual" utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare
"extend[s] to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts
of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision
procedure, then maximizing aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure that gives equal consideration
to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is. If anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal
to equal consideration. Utilitarians appeal to impartiality in order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to
society as a whole (cf. TJ, pp. 26-27). Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of
others as if they were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand, made possible by equal
consideration and sympathy. The significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to equal consideration have nothing to do
with impartiality between persons. What is really being given equal consideration are desires or experiences of the
same magnitude. That these are the desires or experiences of separate persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being)
is simply an incidental fact that has no substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that
we can more accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal
consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of clarity is gained. It is in this
sense that persons enter into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any mention of them can be dropped without
loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how to apply utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong
with the common claim that utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not
substantive equality and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes neither procedural nor substantive
equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read
persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on distributions even get underway, it is little wonder that utilitarianism can
result in such substantive inequalities. What follows is that utilitarian appeals to democracy and the democratic value
of equality are misleading. In no sense do utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern and respect.
 Utilitarianism Bad – Morals
Owning oneself is a moral imperative – utilitarianism imposes interpersonal obligations to
society, which destroys morality
Freeman 94 (Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of
North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp.
313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
Kymlicka distinguishes two interpretations of utilitarianism: teleological and egalitarian. According to Rawls's teleological
interpretation, the "fundamental goal" (LCC, p. 33) of utilitarianism is not persons, but the goodness of
states of affairs. Duty is defined by what best brings about these states of affairs. " [M] aximizing the good is primary, and we count
individuals equally only because that maximizes value. Our primary duty isn't to treat people as equals, but to bring
about valuable states of affairs" (LCC, p. 27). It is difficult to see, Kymlicka says, how this reading of
utilitarianism can be viewed as a moral theory. Morality, in our everyday view at least, is a matter of
interpersonal obligations-the obligations we owe to each other. But to whom do we owe the duty of
maximizing utility? Surely not to the impersonal ideal spectator . . . for he doesn't exist. Nor to the
maximally valuable state of affairs itself, for states of affairs don't have moral claims." (LCC, p. 28-29) Kymlicka says, "This form of
utilitarianism does not merit serious consideration as a political morality" (LCC, p. 29). Suppose we see utilitarianism differently, as a
theory whose "fundamental principle" is "to treat people as equals" (LCC, p. 29). On this egalitarian reading, utilitarianism is a
procedure for aggregating individual interests and desires, a procedure for making social choices, specifying which trade-offs are
acceptable. It's a moral theory which purports to treat people as equals, with equal concern and respect. It does so by counting everyone
for one, and no one for more than one. (LCC, p. 25)
 Utilitarianism Bad – Mass Death
Risks taken by the government to increase overall utility will severely compromise the
individual which will result in fatality
Schroeder 86 (Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, “Rights Against Risks,”, April, Columbia Law
Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
Equity has provided a limited answer to the question of acceptable risk. The traditional doctrine of injunctions
against tortious behavior holds that courts may enjoin behavior that is virtually certain to harm an identifiable
individual in the near future.'2 This body of law, however, focuses more on avoidance of harm to specific persons than on
regulation of risk.'3 It is thus inapposite to the questions of modern technological risk, risk that is quite unlikely to injure any
identifiable individual in the short-term, but that carries severe consequences that are certain to occur
to someone in the medium to distant future. Consider the paradigm of the Acme Chemical Company: Acme Chemical
Company is discovered to be storing chemical wastes on its land in such a way that seepage containing traces of those wastes are
entering an underground water system that serves as the sole drinking water supply for a town several miles away. One of the chemicals
has been classified as a carcinogen in laboratory experiments on mice. Although extrapolating from these results to predictions of human
carcinogencity is somewhat controversial, federal agencies routinely do so. Under one of a number of plausible sets of assumptions, a
concentration of ten parts per billion (ppb) in drinking water is estimated to increase a human's chance of contracting cancer by one in
one hundred thousand if the human is assumed to consume a normal intake over the course of twenty years. Analyses show that the
current concentration in the underground aquifer near Acme's plant is ten ppb. This case exhibits the typical features of risky actions
associated with modern technology. The probability of risk to any individual is relatively small while its
severity is substantial, perhaps fatal. Risk is being imposed on individuals who have not consented to it
in any meaningful sense. Finally, risk is unintentional in the sense that imposing risk on others is not an objective of Acme's
plan.'4 We may assume its executives in fact would be tremendously relieved if they could avoid the risk.
 Utilitarianism Bad – Value to Life
Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on a cost-benefit
basis in an effort to increase overall utility of an entity, while demoralizing the individual’s
own system of values
Schroeder 86 (Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, “Rights Against Risks,”, April, Columbia Law
Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
From the individual's point of view, the balancing of costs and benefits that utilitarianism
endorses renders the status of any individual risk bearer profoundly insecure. A risk bearer
cannot determine from the kind of risk being imposed on him whether it is impermissible or
not. The identical risk may be justified if necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product of an act of profitless
carelessness, but the nature and extent of the underlying benefits of the risky action are fre quently
unknown to the risk bearer so that he cannot know whether or not he is being wronged.
Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is well-known, the status of a risk bearer is
insecure because individuals can justifiably be inflicted with ever greater levels of risk in
conjunction with increasing gains. Certainly, individual risk bearers may be entitled to more protection if the risky
action exposes many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological risks will cause greater harm increases as
more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely to be justifiable. Once again, however, that
insight seems scant comfort to an individual, for it reinforces the realization that, standing
alone, he does not count for much. A strategy of weighing gains against risks thus renders the status of any
specific risk victim substantially contingent upon the claims of others, both those who may share his victim status and those
who stand to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be
overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the "distinctively modern criticism of
utilitarianism,"58 the criticism that, despite its famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one,"59
utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of values . Various
versions of utilitarian ism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure
over pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60 Whatever the specific formulation, the goal of maximizing some mea
sure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual. It reduces the individual to a
conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his monitoring
function.61 It also produces moral requirements that can trample an individual , if necessary, to
maximize utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken
into account, the individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable
proposal, but counting only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the trampling of the few
in furtherance of the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual
radically contingent. The individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing total
utility. Otherwise, the individual can be discarded.
 Utilitarianism Good – Public Sphere
Util can be used in the public sphere, and deontology in the private sphere
Goodin 95 (Robert E., Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, Google Books)JFS
My concern in this book, true to the thrust of this introduction, is with utilitarianism as a public philosophy. My main concern is with the
ways in which utilitarianism can be a good guide to public policies without necessarily being a good guide to
private conduct. Nonetheless, in adducing many of its most important implication for public policy it is important to see at leas in
broad outline how it would set about shaping private conduct. Utilitarians, and consequentialists more generally, are outcome-
oriented. In sharp contrast to Ten Commandment-style deontological approaches, which specify certain actions
to be done as a matter of duty, utilitarian theories assign people responsibility for producing certain
results, leaving the individuals concerned broad discretion about how to achieve those results. The same basic difference in the two
theories' approaches to assigning moral jobs reappears across all levels of moral agency, from private agency, from private individuals to
collective (especially state) actors. The distinctively utilitarian approach, thus conceived, to international protection of the
ozone layer is to assign states responsibility for producing certain effects, leaving them broad discretion
in how they accomplish it (Chapter 18). The distinctively utilitarian approach, thus conceived, to the ethical defense of
nationalism is couched in terms of delimiting state boundaries in such a way as to assign particular organization (Chapter 16). And, at a
more domestic level of analysis, the distinctively utilitarian approach to the allocation of legal liabilities is to assign them to
whomsoever can best discharge them (Chapters 5 through 7). The great advantage of utilitarianism as a guide to
public conduct is that it avoids gratuitous sacrifices, it ensures we are able to ensure in the uncertain
world of public policy-making that politics are sensitive to people's interests or desires or preferences. The great
failing of more deontological theories, applied to those realism, is that they fixate upon duties done for the sake of
duty rather than for the sake of any good that is done by doing one's duty. Perhaps it is permissible (perhaps it is even
proper) for private individuals in the course of their personal affairs to fetishize duties done for their own sake. It would be a mistake for
public officials to do likewise, not least because it is impossible. The fixation of motives makes absolutely no sense in the
public realm, and might make precious little sense in the private one even, as Chapter 3 shows. The reason public action is
required at all arises form the inability of uncoordinated individual action to achieve certain orally desirable
ends. Individuals are rightly excused from pursuing those ends. The inability is real; the excuses, perfectly valid. But libertarians are
right in their diagnosis, wrong in their prescription. That is the message of Chapter 2. The same thing that makes those excuses valid at
the individual level the same thing that relives individuals of responsibility - makes it morally incumber upon individuals to organize
themselves into collective units that are capable of acting where they as isolated individuals are not. When they organize
themselves into these collective units, those collective deliberations inevitably take place under very different
forms. Individuals are morally required to operate in that collective manner, in certain crucial respects. But
they are practically circumscribed in how they can operate, in their collective mode. and those special constraints
characterizing the public sphere of decision-making give rise to the special circumstances that make
utilitarianism peculiarly apt for public policy-making, in ways set out more fully in Chapter 4. Government house
utilitarianism thus understood is, I would argue, a uniquely defensible public philosophy.
 Utilitarianism Good - Inevitable
Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks
Green 2 (Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University Joshua, November 2002, 314) JFS
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If that’s
what we mean by 302 “balancing rights,” then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting to solve moral problems
using a complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same.
However, it’s likely that when some people talk about “balancing competing rights and obligations”
they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language. Once again,
what deontological language does best is express the thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter
that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!”19 That is why angry
protesters say things like, “Animals Have Rights, Too!” rather than, “Animal Testing: The Harms
Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity of the issue and
absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One
thinks, for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the “rights” of those
children. One finds oneself balancing the “rights” on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is
willing to sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day one’s
underlying thought is as thoroughly consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And
what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth
that there really are “rights,” etc. Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the
thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.
 Utilitarianism Good – Moral
The advent of the nuclear age necessitates utilitarianism – absolutist ethics are self-
contradictory
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 18-19) JFS
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.
 Utilitarianism Good – Must Assess All Risks
The recent possibility of extinction requires assessment of all risks despite probability
Yudkowsky 8 (Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder Eliezer, January 22 nd
2008,
“Circular Altruism”)JFS
Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X is not an existential risk
and you don't need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of any one of propositions
A, B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species . "We don't need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because
a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time as an active shield is developed,
capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this
condition will persist indefinitely." Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our probability estimates of security, as
well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly detailed risk
scenarios. More generally, people tend to overestimate conjunctive probabilities and underestimate
disjunctive probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1974.) That is, people tend to overestimate the probability that, e.g., seven
events of 90% probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to underestimate the probability that at least one of seven events of
10% probability will occur. Someone judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup, must evaluate the probability that many
individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers will want the product) while also
considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses a loan, the biggest project fails, the lead scientist
dies). This may help explain why only 44% of entrepreneurial ventures3 survive after 4 years . (Knaup
2005.) Dawes (1988) observes: 'In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions ("either this or that or the other could have
occurred, all of which would lead to the same conclusion") in favor of conjunctions. Rationally, of course, disjunctions are much more
probable than are conjunctions.' The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive
event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks discussed in this book - or some other
cause which none of us fore saw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-
sounding prophecy.
 Morality Bad – Survival Comes First
Survival comes first – there is no point in preserving morality if we all die
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 45-46)JFS
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.
 Policymaking Requires Consequentialism
Even if their values are good, policymaking necessitates consequentialism
Brock, ‘87 [Dan W. Brock, Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical Ethics, and Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics at Brown
University, Ethics, Vol. 97, No. 4, (Jul., 1987), pp. 786-791, JSTOR]JFS
When philosophers become more or less direct participants in the policy-making process and so are no longer
academics just hoping that an occasional policymaker might read their scholarly journal articles, this scholarly virtue of the
unconstrained search for the truth-all assumptions open to question and follow the arguments wherever they lead-comes
under a variety of related pressures. What arises is an intellectual variant of the political problem of "dirty hands"
that those who hold political power often face. I emphasize that I do not conceive of the problem as one of pure, untainted
philosophers being corrupted by the dirty business of politics. My point is rather that the different goals of academic scholarship and
public policy call in turn for different virtues and behavior in their practitioners. Philosophers who steadfastly maintain their academic
ways in the public policy setting are not to be admired as islands of integrity in a sea of messy political compromise and corruption.
Instead, I believe that if philosophers maintain the academic virtues there they will not only find themselves
often ineffective but will as well often fail in their responsibilities and act wrongly. Why is this so? The central point
of conflict is that the first concern of those responsible for public policy is , and ought to be, the consequences of
their actions for public policy and the persons that those policies affect . This is not to say that they should
not be concerned with the moral evaluation of those consequences -they should; nor that they must be moral
consequentialists in the evaluation of the policy, and in turn human, consequences of their actions-whether some form of
consequentialism is an adequate moral theory is another matter. But it is to say that persons who directly participate in
the formation of public policy would be irresponsible if they did not focus their concern on how their actions
will affect policy and how that policy will in turn affect people. The virtues of academic research and scholarship that consist in
an unconstrained search for truth, whatever the consequences, reflect not only the different goals of scholarly work but
also the fact that the effects of the scholarly endeavor on the public are less direct, and are mediated more by other
institutions and events, than are those of the public policy process. It is in part the very impotence in terms of major, direct effects on
people's lives of most academic scholarship that makes it morally acceptable not to worry much about the social
consequences of that scholarship. When philosophers move into the policy domain, they must shift their
primary commitment from knowledge and truth to the policy consequences of what they do. And if they are not prepared to do
this, why did they enter the policy domain? What are they doing there?
 Policymaking Requires Consequentialism
Even if deontology is right, states must act as consequentialists
Stelzig, ‘98[Tim Stelzig, B.A. 1990, West Virginia University; M.A. 1995, University of Illinois at Chicago; J.D. Candidate 1998,
University of Pennsylvania, 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. 901, March, 1998, L/N]JFS
This Comment seeks to dissipate the tension Blackstone broached when he stated that the "eternal boundaries" provided by our "indelible
rights" sometimes must be "modified" or "narrowed" by the "local or occasional necessities of the state."(n269) Rights, as trumps
against the world, ostensibly ought not to be things that may be cast aside. Yet, it is intuitively obvious that the state justifiably
acts in ways impermissible for individuals as it collects taxes, punishes wrongdoers, and the like. Others have offered explanations for
why coercive state action is morally justified. This Comment adds another. This Comment began by adopting deontology as a
foundational theoretic assumption and briefly describing how deontology was to be understood herein. I then examined the characteristics of
two leading theories of rights--Dworkin's theory of legal rights and Thomson's theory of moral rights. Although
neither Dworkin nor Thomson is an absolutist with respect to rights, neither account explains why the state, but not
individuals, may act in ways seemingly justifiable only on consequentialist grounds: that is, why the state may override
the trumping effect of rights. In attempting to provide an answer to this question, I first noted that deontology does not exhaust moral
discourse. The deontologist is forced to recognize that rights cannot capture everything of moral importance. I then
provided several examples of distinctions recognized in the philosophical literature that delimit areas in which deontology does not apply,
focusing in particular on the Trolley Problem and the distributive exemption from deontological norms that the Trolley Problem illustrates.
The deontological exemption was examined fairly closely in order to enumerate the criteria that trigger the exemption and understand the
principles that guide its application. By applying the distributive exemption to the state, I accomplished two things. First, I was able to
provide a new justification for the existence of the coercive state, both when premised on the traditional assumptions of
social contractarians, and when premised on a more realistic understanding of the modern state. Second, I was able to sketch the relationship
between the constraints of rights and the demands of policy, justifying a state that provides for the general welfare without
violating rights in a way objectionable to liberals. Libertarians have argued that such a state violates deontologicalnorms, that
governmental intervention going beyond what is minimally necessary to preserve social order is not justified. Deontology
does not require such a timid state and, moreover, finds desirable a state which promotes the general welfare to the fullest extent
possible, even if in so doing it acts in ways deontologically objectionable for anyone other than one filling the government's unique role in
society. More specifically, I argued that the government must consequentially justify its policy choices. The elegance of
this particular rationale for the contours of permissible governmental action is that it remains a deontological justification at
base. One of the worries of full-blown consequentialism is that it requires too much, that any putative right
may be set aside if doing so would produce greater good. The justification offered here does not suffer that flaw.
The distributive exemption does not permit that any one be sacrificed for the betterment of others; rather, it only
permits a redistribution of inevitable harms, a diversion of an existing threatened harm to many such that it results in harm to
fewer individuals.
 Consequentialism Good – Lesser Evil
We must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must be made to
limit further atrocities against civilization
Issac 02 (Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)JFS
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean
taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism . There is a tendency in some
quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still
deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the
continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the
specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many
innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each
case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and
deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians
work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does
not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11
hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an
ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer
superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race
and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent
conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence.
Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly
acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often
politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends . A just or even a
better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to
respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not
between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the
wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to
oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the
Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in
effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the
incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are
available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate.
Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.
 Consequentialism Good – Not Calculation
No turns – consequentialism is more than pure calculation
Ord 5 (Toby, Thesis Paper for Oxford in Philosophy, http://tinyurl.com/2c5456q)JFS
Consequentialism is often charged with being self-defeating , for if a person attempts to apply it, she
may quite predictably produce worse outcomes than if she applied some other moral theory. Many consequentialists have
replied that this criticism rests on a false assumption, confusing consequentialism’s criterion of the rightness of an act with its position
on decision procedures. Consequentialism, on this view, does not dictate that we should be always calculating
which of the available acts leads to the most good, but instead advises us to decide what to do in whichever manner
it is that will lead to the best outcome. Whilst it is typically afforded only a small note in any text on consequentialism, this
reply has deep implications for the practical application of consequentialism, perhaps entailing that a
consequentialist should eschew calculation altogether.
 Consequentialism Good – Morals

Consequentialism is not incompatible with morals – moralists do things based on whether

they will have moral consequences
Frank 2 (Robert, Cornell University, “The Status of Moral Emotions in Consequentialist Moral Reasoning”, http://tinyurl.com/22truv3)JFS
The philosopher Bernard Williams describes an example in which a botanist wanders into a village in the
jungle where ten innocent people are about to be shot. He is told that nine of them will be spared if he himself
will shoot the tenth. What should the botanist do? Although most people would prefer to see only one innocent person
die rather than ten, Williams argues that it would be wrong as a matter of principle for the botanist to shoot the innocent villager.2 And
most people seem to agree. The force of the example is its appeal to a widely shared moral intuition. Yet some philosophers
counter that it is the presumed validity of moral intuitions that such examples call into question (Singer, 2002). These
consequentialists insist that whether an action is morally right depends only on its consequences. The
right choice, they argue, is always the one that leads to the best overall consequences. I will argue that
consequentialists make a persuasive case that moral intuitions are best ignored in at least some specific cases. But many
consequentialists appear to take the stronger position that moral intuitions should play no role in moral choice. I will argue against that
position on the grounds that should appeal to their way of thinking. As I will attempt to explain, ignoring moral intuitions would lead to
undesirable consequences. My broader aim is to expand the consequentialist framework to take explicit account of
moral sentiments.
 Morality Bad – International Violence
Morality cannot address international violence – we must make sacrifices
Issac 2 (Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)JFS
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It is assumed that U.S. military
intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is
a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather
terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to
ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the
violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring
criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent
and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how
diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so
would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention
but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics.
Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the
distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary
to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond
morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. 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.