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On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 09:31:56PM -0500, Kevin Elliott wrote:
> At 16:56 -0700 10/25/00, Nathan Saper wrote:
> >I am fairly familar with utilitarian thought. My specific form of
> >utilitarianism is act utilitarianism, which means that each individual
> >action is evaulated, instead of using utilitarian ideas to form a
> >complete system of moral thought.
>
> The problem with act utilitarianism is that in whatever form it takes
> it leaves itself much to open to the problems of personal view point.
> Hitler felt himself completely justified in murdering all the jews
> because he felt they were causing an enormous amount of pain to the
> rest of the population. He would have been justified under your
> framework IF it could be shown they were causing sufficient pain,
> although that would necessarily be enormous amount of pain.
>
Yup. He killed millions of Jews. Killing millions of Jews is pretty
fucking bad. Therefore, they would have to be doing something REALLY
BAD to warrant killing them. Like, I guess if having millions of Jews
around would mean the end of the universe, then yeah, he'd be
justified in killing them.
In any case, were the Jews causing any pain in Europe? No. Hitler
was a dumbass, and if he can't prove that they are causing ENOURMOUS
pain, then he is acting immorally.
> >The reason why I use "the least pain for the greatest number" instead of
> >"the greatest happiness for the greatest number" is because the latter
> >justifies many not-so-great acts under act utilitarianism. Consider
> >this example:
> >
> > There is going to be a Sado-Masachism (sp?) convention, which
> > will be attended by 10,000 S&M-ers. They kidnap a poor person,
> > bring him to their convention, and electrically shock him. This
> > delights the crowd, but devastates the poor person. Under the
> > common definition of utilitarianism, this act is justified
> > because it pleasures 10,000, while hurting only 1. However,
> > under my definition, this act is not justified because it creates
> > a lot of pain, whereas not doing it does not create any pain.
>
> This is a problem with any formulation of act utilitarianism. Any
> formulation of act utilitarianism inherently falls victim to a set of
> extreme circumstances that result in outcomes which are clearly
> immoral (see the Hitler example above for a counter example). That's
> why I'm not an act utilitarianist....
I don't think your Hitler example applies, because he could not prove
that the Jews were causing pain. In any case, my formulation of act
utilitarianism seems to suffer from those sorts of attacks less than
the normal formulation, and I have yet to find a moral theory as
coherant as utilitarianism.
- --
Nathan Saper ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) | http://www.well.com/user/natedog/
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