Theoriekamers

Onpartijdigheid en integriteit

 Typerend voor het utilisme is dat - als het gaat om het bepalen van maatschappelijk nut of welvaart - ieders welvaart of nut even hard mee telt. Het utilisme is onpartijdig. Volgens sommige utilisten impliceert dit dat we geen speciale morele verplichtingen hebben tegenover familie of mensen in onze directe omgeving. Een aantal critici van het utilisme beschouwt dit als een onwenselijke eigenschap van het utilisme. Williams is van mening dat de onpartijdigheid in het utilisme leidt tot een aantasting van iemands integriteit. Hij geeft een voorbeeld waarin ik door iemand dood te schieten het leven van negentien anderen kan redden. Volgens het utilisme moet ik dat in zo'n geval doen. Williams bestrijdt niet zozeer die conclusie als wel de wijze waarop het utilisme tot die conclusie komt. Zijn bezwaar is vooral dat in het utilisme mijn negatieve morele gevoelens bij het doodschieten van iemand geen rol spelen, of hooguit als leidend tot negatief nut dat gecompenseerd wordt door het positief nut van de negentien mensen die niet vermoord worden. Het utilisme dwingt mij mijn (morele) gevoelens te behandelen als hadden het ook de gevoelens van iemand anders kunnen zijn. Het utilisme vervreemdt mij daarom van mij morele gevoelens en van de morele commitments naar bijvoorbeeld vrienden en familie. Het utilisme tast om deze redenen volgens Williams mijn integriteit aan. Commentaar gevend op Williams' voorbeeld komt Smart tot de conclusie dat het inderdaad soms zo is dat het utilisme vereist dat ik mijn integriteit of innerlijke harmonie opgeeft. Hij beschouwt dat echter niet als een negatief kenmerk van het utilisme.

Wie het onpartijdige standpunt van het utilisme serieus neemt moet ook tot de conclusie komen dat in veel gevallen het wenselijker is je geld te besteden aan bijvoorbeeld hulp aan mensen in Afrika dan ten behoeve van je eigen welvaart of dat van je naaste verwanten. Dat is in ieder geval wat betoogd wordt door utilisten als Singer en Unger.


Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams

B. Williams, "A critique of utilitarianism"in Smart, J.J. and Williams, B. (1973) Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 97-104 (gedeeltes)

(1) George, who has just taken his Ph.D. in chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in health, which cuts down the number of jobs he might be able to do satisfactorily. His wife has to go out to work to keep them, which itself causes a great deal of strain, since they have small children and there are severe problems about looking after them. The result of all this, especially on the children, are damaging. An older chemist, who knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemical an biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any such scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George would. Indeed, it is not merely concern for George and his family, but (to speak frankly and in confidence) some alarm about this man’s excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to use his influence to get George the job…
George’s wife, to whom he is deeply attached, has views (the details of which not need to concern us) from which it follows that at least there is nothing particularly wrong with research into CBW. What should he do?

(2) Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a random group of the inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim is an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indian himself. If Jim accepts, then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of that kind is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation, and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?

To these dilemmas, it seems to me that utilitarianism replies, in the first case, that George should accept the job, and in the second, that Jim should kill the Indian. Not only does utilitarianism give these answers, but if the situations are essentially as described and there are no further special factors, it regards them, it seems to me, as obviously the right answers. But many of us would certainly wonder whether in (1), that could possible to be the right answer at all; and in the case of (2), even one who came to think that perhaps that was the answer, might well wonder whether it was obviously the answer. Nor is it just the question of the rightness or obviousness of these answers. It is also a question of what sort of considerations come into finding the answer. A feature of utilitarianism is that it cuts out a kind of consideration which for some others makes a difference to what they feel about such cases: a consideration involving the idea, as we might first and very simple put it, that each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do. This is an idea closely connected with the value of integrity. It is often suspected that utilitarianism, at least in its direct forms, makes integrity as a value more or less unintelligible. I shall try to show that this suspicion is correct. Of course, even if that is correct, it would not necessarily follow that we should reject utilitarianism; perhaps, as utilitarians sometimes suggest, we should just forget about integrity, in favour of such things as a concern for the general good.

[…]

In Jim’s case, […], his feelings might seem to be of very little weight compared with other things that are at stake. There is a powerful and recognizable appeal that can be made on this point: as that a refusal by Jim to do what he has been invited to do would be a kind of self-indulgent squeamishness.

[…]

The reason why the squeamishness appeal can be very unsettling, and one can be unnerved by the suggestion of self-indulgence in going against utilitarian considerations, is not that we are utilitarians who are uncertain what utilitarian value to attach to our moral feelings, but that we are partially at least not utilitarians and cannot regard our moral feelings merely as objects of utilitarian value. Because our moral relation to the world is partly given by such feelings, and by sense of what we can or cannot ‘live with’, to come to regard those feelings from a purely utilitarian point of view, that is to say, as happenings outside one’s moral self, is to lose a sense of one’s integrity. At this point utilitarianism alienates one from one’s moral feelings.


J.J.C. Smart

J.J.C. Smart

J.J.C. Smart, "Utilitarianism and Justice", Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 1978.


Peter Singer

Peter Singer

 

In the Brazilian film Central Station, Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old to be adopted - he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora resolves to take the boy back.
Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world, other people have nice new TV's too, and if selling the kid is the only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. She would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster. She redeems herself only by being prepared to bear considerable risks to save the boy.

At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the affluent nations of the world, people who would have been quick to condemn Dora if she had not rescued the boy go home to places far more comfortable than her apartment. In fact, the average family in the United States spends almost one-third of its income on things that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was to her. Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because the old ones are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach resorts - so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need.

All of which raises a question: In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one - knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?

Of course, there are several differences between the two situations that could support different moral judgments about them. For one thing, to be able to consign a child to death when he is standing right in front of you takes a chilling kind of heartlessness; it is much easier to ignore an appeal for money to help children you will never meet. Yet for a utilitarian philosopher like myself - that is, one who judges whether acts are right or wrong by their consequences - if the upshot of the American's failure to donate the money is that one more kid dies on the streets of a Brazilian city, then it is, in some sense, just as bad as selling the kid to the organ peddlers. But one doesn't need to embrace my utilitarian ethic to see that, at the very least, there is a troubling incongruity in being so quick to condemn Dora for taking the child to the organ peddlers while, at the same time, not regarding the American consumer's behavior as raising a serious moral issue.

Peter Singer, "The Singer Solution to World Poverty", The New Yoork Times Sunday Magazine, September 5, 1999, p. 60. (http://www.petersingerlinks.com/solution.htm)