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Utilitarianism and Respect for Human Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

T. L. S. Sprigge
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Extract

Bentham and Mill and probably most utilitarians (though Sidgwick is in part an exception) have a good deal in common with Hobbes and Spinoza as moral thinkers. For they share a commitment to deriving ethics from the actual and normal motivitations of human beings as creatures of the natural world rather than, like Kant and many religious moralists, from some transcendent realm to the requirements of which natural man has a duty to submit without expecting any help therefrom in the satisfaction of his natural inclinations. In the present context I shall call all such thinkers ethical naturalists, though I do not mean this expression in any very precise technical sense, only to indicate a commitment to somehow deriving morality from natural fact.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1989 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 I have argued for this at length in Sprigge, T. L. S., The Rational Foundations of Ethics, London, 1987, chs. v–vii.Google Scholar

2 I am grateful to Dr. Vinit Haksar for discussion of these matters and for helpful comments on a first draft of this paper, and to him and Mr. George Morice for bibliographical help.

3 Thomas Nagel has argued tentatively against the tradition that death is not an evil (Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1971, ch. iGoogle Scholar). See also Luper-Fox, Steven, ‘Annihilation’, Philosophical Quarterly, xxxvii (1987), 233–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, the old arguments, as given most eloquently by Lucretius, seem to me unassailable.

4 See Henson, R. G., ‘Utilitarianism and the Wrongness of Killing’, Philosophical Review, lxxx (1971), 320–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a good example of the claim that utilitarianism cannot deal acceptably with the wrongness of killing. See also Devine, Philip E., ‘Homicide Revisited’, Philosophy, lv (1980), 329–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For my reasons see Sprigge, T. L. S., ‘Utilitarianism’, An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Parkinson, G. H. R., London, 1988, pp. 590–612, especially pp. 606–8Google Scholar, and less fully Sprigge, , The Rational Foundations, pp. 23–5.Google Scholar

6 The bearing of the opposition between consequentialism and deontological ethics on the matter of killing crops up several times in the collection (including its introduction) Consequentialism and its Critics, ed. Schemer, Samuel, Oxford, 1988.Google Scholar

7 Glover, Jonathan, Causing Death and Saving Lives, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 83Google Scholar. As Vinit Haksar has shown there is some unclarity as to whether Glover thinks of autonomy as a good to be pursued in conjunction with welfare or whether respect for the autonomy of those one is immediately dealing with is a constraint upon the promotion of good. See Haksar, Vinit, Equality, Liberty and Perfectionism, Oxford, 1979, pp. 134–5Google Scholar. On the whole he seems to mean the second.

8 Haworth, Lawrence (‘Autonomy and Utility’, Ethics, xcv (1984), 5–19)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has claimed that utilitarianism must give a special place to autonomy. I do not find his argument, based on the claim that only autonomous pleasures can be regarded as pertaining to a person's real good, very convincing. I grant that some pleasures forced on us in a somewhat extrinsic way may not be deeply satisfying, but surely any utilitarian worth his salt will think a deeply satisfying pleasure good whatever the explanation of how it first became a pleasure. Education, for example, should promote the capacity for fresh kinds of pleasures, not only those which would have been such anyway. Cf. Devine, , 335.Google Scholar

9 Cf. Benson, John, ‘Who is the autonomous man?’, Philosophy, lviii (1983), 5–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Benson, , 8.Google Scholar

11 Devine, , 334.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Haksar, , pp. 130–39.Google Scholar

13 Glover, , p. 136.Google Scholar

14 A straight statement of this kind of objection is made by Goodrich, T. in ‘The Morality of Killing’, Philosophy, xliv (1969), 134ffGoogle Scholar. For a good reply see Talmage, S., ‘Utilitarianism and the Morality of Killing’, Philosophy, xlvii (1972), 47, 55–63.Google Scholar

15 See Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking, Oxford, 1981, ch. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lewis, C. I., An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, La Salle, 1946, pp. 546ff.Google Scholar

16 Consider in this connection ‘Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation’, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John, 11 vols., Edinburgh, 1843, i. 169–94Google Scholar (also in Traités de législation civile et pénale, ed. Dumont, P. É. L., 1802, iii. 325–95).Google Scholar

17 Hare, , Moral Thinking, especially chs. 2 and 3.Google Scholar

18 Glover, , pp. 126ffGoogle Scholar. seems to me misleading in this way in a manner not sufficiently offset by the explanation on p. 40.

19 This is, after all, the brunt of Glover's case against the commissions/omissions distinction.

20 Compare Glover, , pp. 210–16.Google Scholar

21 Devine, , 332.Google Scholar

22 Locke, Don, ‘Why the Utilitarians shot President Kennedy’, Analysis, xxxvi (1975–1976), 153–5.Google Scholar

23 Cf. Ewin, R. E., ‘What is wrong with killing people?’, Philosophical Quarterly, xxii (1972), 139.Google Scholar

24 It seems clear enough that countenancing infanticide of children merely on grounds of parental convenience would not be thus congruent, so that the kind of utilitarian case for infanticide viewed with alarm by critics of utilitarianism (see, for example, Haksar, , p. 132Google Scholar) does not seem to me one which would be made by someone whose serious concern was with the advancement of human happiness. The case of quite grossly abnormal children is more problematic, but however he decides it the utilitarian will not be obviously at loggerheads with some settled consensus of normal moral feeling.