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Donagan On The Sins Of Consequentialism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Shelly Kagan
Shelly Kagan*
Affiliation:
The University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL60680U.S.A.
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Extract

Most intuitively forceful criticisms of utilitarianism, I believe, reduce to two basic objections. Both arise from the relentlessness of the utilitarian injunction to promote the overall good. On the one hand, this means that agents are permitted to perform an act of any kind whatsoever–provided only that the consequences of that act are better than those of any alternative. In particular, this means that it is permissible to impose tremendous sacrifices or injuries upon someone, if this is the only way to ensure even greater gains for others. But in allowing agents to deliberately impose harm on someone for the sake of others, utilitarianism seems to permit acts which are morally unacceptable. Intuitively, we want to say that rights, or other moral prohibitions, forbid treating people in certain ways–ways allowed by utilitarianism. This, then, is the first major objection: utilitarianism permits too much.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 643 - 653
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at a conference of the Illinois Philosophical Association on ‘The Philosophy of Alan Donagan,’ November 4, 1983.

References

1 Donagan, Alan The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All page references in the text are to this work.

2 Donagan, Alan ‘Is There a Credible Form of Utilitarianism?’ in Bayles, Michael D. ed., Contemporary Utilitarianism (New York: Doubleday 1968)Google Scholar

3 See, e.g., the example mentioned in note 6 below.

4 It may be that Donagan's claim that ‘it should now be plain’ why the precepts contain the condition ‘by morally permissible actions’ indicates a belief that the matter has, in effect, just been explained. But I can find nothing in the immediately preceding paragraphs to support such a view. It is also possible that the quoted passage takes the substantive claim to have been already established in the earlier sections to which it refers; but it would be circular to have each passage appealing to the other.

5 Donagan also offers a schematic version of his argument (157); but this appears to embody the same mistake.

6 Donagan does criticize utilitarianism for requiring that we make sacrifices to aid the lazy and the wicked who have brought their woe ‘upon themselves’ (209). To the extent that this objection is plausible, however, I think that it turns on the fact that we don't really feel that the consequences are better when sacrifices are made for the undeserving (even if there is a net gain in mere happiness). Such judgments about desert could be incorporated into a theory of the good. If a consequentialist theory of the right were combined with such a theory of the good, it would escape the counter-example.

7 In informal comments prepared in initial response to this paper, Donagan suggested that he did not attempt to ground morality on the notion of ‘respect’ or ’respect for persons’ per se, but rather on the notion of ‘respect for persons as rational creatures’ (a concept explicated especially at 59-66). This is certainly true, but I do not believe it would weaken any of my arguments if we were, cumbersomely, to substitute the third expression where I have used one of the first two.