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A Paradox for Weak Deontology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2009

MICHAEL HUEMER
MICHAEL HUEMER*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

Deontological ethicists generally agree that there is a way of harming others such that it is wrong to harm others in that way for the sake of producing a comparable but greater benefit for others. Given plausible assumptions, this principle leads to the possibility of paradoxical cases in which each of two actions is wrong, yet the combination of both actions is permissible. Consequentialism provides the most natural solution of the puzzle.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 464 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Indianapolis, 1988), pp. 21–2; and Kamm, F. M., ‘Non-consequentialism, the Person as an End-in-Itself, and the Significance of Status’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992), p. 383Google Scholar. Nozick, Robert, though sometimes taken for an absolutist, withholds judgment on the need for some such qualification (Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), p. 31n.)Google Scholar.

2 This example is from Foot, Philippa, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect’, Oxford Review 5 (1967), pp. 5–15Google Scholar, with a modification suggested by Thomson, Judith Jarvis in Rights, Restitution, and Risk, ed. Parent, William (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 96Google Scholar.

3 This example derives originally from James Rachels in informal conversations in the 1960s.

4 See Foot, ‘The Problem of Abortion’.

5 See Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, pp. 83–4.

6 See Physics IV.8, 216a12–17, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941).

7 Galilei, Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (Buffalo, NY, 1991), pp. 62–3Google Scholar.

8 Perhaps more precisely, Aristotle's theory implies that the rate at which an object or pair of objects falls depends upon whether it/they is/are in fact one object or two (regardless of how we view them).

9 In my ‘Revisionary Intuitionism’ (Social Philosophy & Policy 25 (2008), pp. 368–92), I argue that formal ethical intuitions should typically be given greater weight in ethical theorizing than other intuitions.

10 See Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism, rev. edn. (Oxford, 1994), pp. 80–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 28–9; Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, p. 114.

11 This statement is obviously too simple. It would permit one, for example, after saving someone's life, to subsequently beat that person up, since the combination of actions – saving the victim's life and beating him up – still benefits him overall. This sort of objection can probably be best avoided by modifying the proposed condition so as to require that each of the actions in the set in question be essential to the production of the overall benefit for all persons affected.

12 Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, pp. 98–9.

13 I would like to thank Jackie Colby, Andrew Bailey, and the participants of the 2005 Northwest Conference on Philosophy for their insightful comments and questions regarding an earlier version of this article.