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Deontology Good

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Consequentialism Kills VTL

Consequential framework destroys intrinsic value to life- they
reduce human life to a calculable object.
Grisez, professor of Christian ethics @ Mount Saint Marys
College and Shaw, Director of public information at Knights of
Columbus, 94

(Germain and Russell, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 2526)
If there are no ethical absolutes, human persons, rather than being the
norm and source from which other things receive their value, become
simply items or commodities with a relative value-- inviolable only up to
the point at which it is expedient to violate them in order to achieve an
objective. It would then make no sense at all to speak of the immeasurable
value of the human person from being. Far from being immeasurablethat
is, beyond calculationthe value of a person would be quite specific and
quantifiable, something to be weighed in the balance against other
values.

Utilitarianism destroys human dignity - Treats people as means

to an end
Grisez, professor of Christian ethics @ Mount Saint Marys
College and Shaw, Director of public information at Knights of
Columbus, 94
(Germain Gabriel and Russell, Beyond the New Morality: The Responsibilities of
Freedom p 28)
One arrives at a different judgment of how one ought to proceed in such
circumstances if human life is regarded, not as one of the things of relative value
which a person has, but as an intrinsic component of the person, and so as a value
which shares in the dignity of the person. In denying that we can choose to kill
one person for the sake of two, we really are denying that two persons are
"worth" twice as much as some other real person. On this view it is simply
not possible to make the sort of calculation which weighs persons against
each other (my life is more valuable than John's life, John's life is more valuable
than Mary's and Tom's combined, or vice versa) and thus to determine whose
life shall be respected and whose sacrificed. The value of each human
person is incalculable, not in any merely poetic sense, but simply because
it is not susceptible to calculation, measurement, weighing, and
balancing. Traditionally this point has been expressed by the statement that the
end does not justify the means. This is a way of saying that the direct
violation of any good intrinsic to the person cannot be justified by the
good result which such a violation may bring about. What is extrinsic to
human persons may be used for the good of persons, but what is intrinsic
to persons has a kind of sacredness and may not be violated.

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Utilitarianism Justifies Atrocities

Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves
utilitarianism justifies any atrocity.
Anderson, National Director of Probe Ministries International
2004
(Kerby, Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
http://www.probe.org/theology-and-philosophy/worldview--philosophy/utilitarianismthe-greatest-good-for-thegreatest-number.html)
One problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to an "end justifies the
means" mentality. If any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it,
a true ethical foundation is lost. But we all know that the end does not justify
the means. If that were so, then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because
the end was to purify the human race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of
millions because he was trying to achieve a communist utopia. The end
never justifies the means. The means must justify themselves. A particular
act cannot be judged as good simply because it may lead to a good consequence.
The means must be judged by some objective and consistent standard of
morality. Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities if
the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number. Americans in the
eighteenth century could justify slavery on the basis that it provided a
good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority
benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much
worse. A third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If
morality is based on results, then we would have to have omniscience in
order to accurately predict the consequence of any action. But at best we
can only guess at the future, and often these educated guesses are
wrong. A fourth problem with utilitarianism is that consequences
themselves must be judged. When results occur, we must still ask whether
they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism provides no objective and
consistent foundation to judge results because results are the mechanism
used to judge the action itself.inviolability is intrinsically valuable.

Without absolute side constraints against violating human

dignity, utilitarianism becomes a justification for slavery,
torture, and murder.
Clifford, Professor of Philosophy @ Mississippi State University,
11
[Michael, Spring, MORAL LITERACY, Volume 11, Issue 2,
https://webprod1.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Clifford_Moral_Literacy.pdf, Accessed 7-6-13,
ABS]
Whether or not you believe in individual rights, whether or not you are
convinced by arguments one way or another about the metaphysical
grounds of rights, we can all appreciate the idea that any ethics should
recognize the fundamental dignity of human beings. This is precisely what worries
critics of utilitarianism, that it may require us to violate that dignity, for some at least, if doing so will promote the

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For
the deontologist, such as Kant, we have a duty not to violate human dignity,
even if it causes us pain, even if the consequences fail to maximize the
overall happiness. The inviolate character of human dignity is expressed
most practically by the idea that we have certain basic rights (whatever the
greatest happiness. But to violate human dignity is to ignore or to misunderstand the very point of ethics.

source of rights are, whether natural or by convention). John Locke defined rights as prima facie entitlements,
which means that anyone who would restrict my rights bears the burden of proving that there are good reasons for
doing so. For example, the right to private property is sometimes trumped by the principle of eminent domain,
provided that I too stand to gain by seizure of my land. My right to free speech is limited by the harm it might cause

There are times when we feel justified in

limiting or abrogating certain positive rights for the common good, but
even here no social outcome justifies torture, slavery, murder, or any
action which violates my fundamental human dignity. Deontological ethics
assumes there to be a line that cannot be crossed, regardless of the
consequences.
by, say, shouting fire! in a crowded theatre.

Utilitarianism can be manipulated to justify any atrocity their

framework condones mass slaughter.
Holt, commentator for the BBC, writes frequently about politics
and philosophy 1995
(Jim, New York Times, Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic, August 5, p. Lexis)

Can the deliberate massacre of innocent people ever be condoned? The

atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, resulted
in the deaths of 120,000 to 250,000 Japanese by incineration and radiation
poisoning. Although a small fraction of the victims were soldiers, the great majority
were noncombatants -- women, children, the aged. Among the justifications that
have been put forward for President Harry Trumans decision to use the
bomb, only one is worth taking seriously -- that it saved lives. The alternative,
the reasoning goes, was to launch an invasion. Truman claimed in his
memoirs that this would have cost another half a million American lives.
Winston Churchill put the figure at a million. Revisionist historians have cast doubt
on such numbers. Wartime documents suggest that military planners expected
around 50,000 American combat deaths in an invasion. Still, when Japanese
casualties, military and civilian, are taken into account, the overall invasion death
toll on both sides would surely have ended up surpassing that from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Scholars will continue to argue over whether there were other, less
catastrophic ways to force Tokyo to surrender. But given the fierce obstinacy of the
Japanese militarists, Truman and his advisers had some grounds for believing that
nothing short of a full-scale invasion or the annihilation of a big city with an
apocalyptic new weapon would have succeeded. Suppose they were right. Would
this prospect have justified the intentional mass killing of the people of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the debate over the question, participants on
both sides have been playing the numbers game. Estimate the hypothetical
number of lives saved by the bombings, then add up the actual lives lost. If
the first number exceeds the second, then Truman did the right thing; if
the reverse, it was wrong to have dropped the bombs. That is one approach
to the matter -- the utilitarian approach. According to utilitarianism, a form of
moral reasoning that arose in the 19th century, the goodness or evil of an
action is determined solely by its consequences. If somehow you can save
10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead and boil that baby. There is, however,

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an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes a
quite different view. The gist of it is expressed by St. Pauls condemnation of those
who say, Let us do evil, that good may come. Some actions, this tradition holds,
can never be justified by their consequences; they are absolutely
forbidden. It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved
thereby. Applying this absolutist morality to war can be tricky. When enemy
soldiers are trying to enslave or kill us, the principle of self-defense permits us to kill
them (though not to slaughter them once they are taken prisoner). But what of
those who back them? During World War II, propagandists made much of the
indivisibility of modern warfare: the idea was that since the enemy nations entire
economic and social strength was deployed behind its military forces, the whole
population was a legitimate target for obliteration. There are no civilians in Japan,
declared an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force shortly before the Hiroshima
bombing, a time when the Japanese were popularly depicted as vermin worthy of
extermination. The boundary between combatant and noncombatant can be fuzzy,
but the distinction is not meaningless, as the case of small children makes clear. Yet
is wartime killing of those who are not trying to harm us always tantamount to
murder? When naval dockyards, munitions factories and supply lines are bombed,
civilian carnage is inevitable. The absolutist moral tradition acknowledges this by a
principle known as double effect: although it is always wrong to kill innocents
deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some
noncombatants will die as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even
justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is lying ill. It does not, however, apply to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Transformed into hostages by the technology of aerial
bombardment, the people of those cities were intentionally executed en masse to
send a message of terror to the rulers of Japan. The practice of ordering the
massacre of civilians to bring the enemy to heel scarcely began with Truman. Nor
did the bomb result in casualties of a new order of magnitude. The earlier bombing
of Tokyo by incendiary weapons killed some 100,000 people. What Hiroshima and
Nagasaki did mark, by the unprecedented need for rationalization they
presented, was the triumph of utilitarian thinking in the conduct of war.
The conventional code of noncombatant immunity -- a product of several centuries
of ethical progress among nations, which had been formalized by an international
commission in the 1920s in the Hague -- was swept away. A simpler axiom took its
place: since war is hell, any means necessary may be used to end, in Churchills
words, the vast indefinite butchery. It is a moral calculus that, for all its logical
consistency, offends our deep-seated intuitions about the sanctity of life -- our
conviction that a person is always to be treated as an end, never as a
means. Left up to the warmakers, moreover, utilitarian calculations are
susceptible to bad-faith reasoning: tinker with the numbers enough and
virtually any atrocity can be excused in the national interest. In January, the
world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where
mass slaughter was committed as an end in itself -- the ultimate evil. The moral
nature of Hiroshima is ambiguous by contrast. Yet in the postwar era, when
governments do not hesitate to treat the massacre of civilians as just another
strategic option, the bombs sinister legacy is plain: it has inured us to the
idea of reducing innocents to instruments and morality to arithmetic.

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Side Constraints
Even if we should evaluate consequences, there should be
absolute side constraints on deliberately harming innocent
people.
Fried, Professor of law @ Harvard, 94
(Charles, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 74)
The opposing conception of right and wrong, the conception that there are
some things we must not do no matter what good we hope to accomplish,
has always stood as a provocation and a scandal to consequentialism. If a
state of the world is the best possible state and we bring it about at the least
possible cost, what else can matter? Yet the opposing conception (the
deontological) holds that how one achieves one's goals has a moral
significance which is not subsumed in the importance and magnitude of
the goals. Whether we get to the desired end state by deliberately
hurting innocent people, by violating their rights, by lies and violence, is
intensely important. And yet the deontologist does not deny that states of the
world are sources of value and even agrees that the good inherent in states of the
world (including our own states of mind) is the only good. If a happy state of the
world existed that had been brought about through wrong and violation of
right, and if those wrongs could no longer be righted, there is nothing that says
that this happiness would not count as real happiness and should not be enjoyed;
still, if this happiness had been ours to choose only by wrongful means, we would
have had to wave it away. We would have to wave it away because right
and wrong are the foundations of our moral personality. We choose our
goods, but if what we choose is to have value as a good, then the entity doing
the choosing must have value, and the process of choice must be such that
what comes out of it has value. In the view I shall elaborate, right and wrong
have an independent and overriding status because they establish our
basic position as freely choosing entities. That is why nothing we choose
can be more important than the ground'right and wrongfor our
choosing. Right and wrong are the expressions of respect for personsrespect for
others and self-respect.

You should never commit a sure evil to avoid a possible oneconsequentialist logic can be manipulated, and other actions
can be taken to mitigate or avoid their disads.
Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy @ The University of Chicago,
84
(Alan, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 138-139)

6. There is, however, another side to this story. What of the thousands of
innocent persons in the distant city whose lives are imperilled by the
threatened nuclear explosion? Don't they too have rights to life which,
because of their numbers, are far superior to the mother's right? May they not
contend that while it is all very well for Abrams to preserve his moral purity by not
killing his mother, he has no right to purchase this at the expense of their lives,

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thereby treating them as mere means to his ends and violating their own rights?
Thus it may be argued that the morally correct description of the alternative
confront- ing Abrams is not simply that it is one of not violating or violating an
innocent person's right to life, but rather not violating one innocent person's right to
life and thereby violating the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons
through being partly responsible for their deaths, or violating one innocent person's
right to life and thereby protecting or fulfilling the right to life of thousands of other
innocent persons. We have here a tragic conflict of rights and an illustration of
the heavy price exacted by moral absolutism. The aggregative consequentialist who holds that that action ought always to be performed which
maximizes utility or minimizes disutility would maintain that in such a situation the
lives of the thousands must be preferred. An initial answer may be that
terrorists who make such demands and issue such threats cannot be trusted to keep
their word not to drop the bombs if the mother is tortured to death; and even if they
now do keep their word, acceding in this case would only lead to further escalated
demands and threats. It may also be argued that it is irrational to perpetrate a
sure evil in order to forestall what is so far only a possible or threatened
evil. Philippa Foot has sagely commented on cases of this sort that if it is the
son's duty to kill his mother in order to save the lives of the many other
innocent residents of the city, then "anyone who wants us to do something
we think wrong has only to threaten that otherwise he himself will do
something we think worse".8 Much depends, however, on the nature of the
"wrong" and the "worse". If someone threatens to commit suicide or to kill innocent hostages if we do not break our promise to do some relatively unimportant
action, breaking the promise would be the obviously right course, by the criterion of
degrees of necessity for action. The special difficulty of the present case stems from
the fact that the conflicting rights are of the same supreme degree of importance. It
may be contended, however, that this whole answer, focusing on the probable
outcome of obeying the terrorists' demands, is a conse- quentialist argument and,
as such, is not available to the absolutist who insists that Abrams must not torture
his mother to death whatever the consequences.9 This contention imputes to the
absolutist a kind of indifference or even callousness to the sufferings of others that
is not warranted by a correct understanding of his position. He can be concerned
about consequences so long as he does not regard them as possibly
superseding or diminishing the right and duty he regards as absolute. It is a
matter of priorities. So long as the mother's right not to be tortured to death by
her son is unqualifiedly respected, the absolutist can seek ways to mitigate
the threatened disastrous consequences and possibly to avert them
altogether. A parallel case is found in the theory of legal punishment: the
retributivist, while asserting that punishment must be meted out only to the persons
who deserve it because of the crimes they have committed, may also uphold
punish- ment for its deterrent effect so long as the latter, consequentialist
consideration is subordinated to and limited by the conditions of the former,
antecedentalist consideration.' Thus the absolutist can accommodate at least
part of the consequentialist's substantive concerns within the limits of his
own principle.

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Intervening Action
The principle of intervening action means we arent morally
culpable for the reaction or backlash of other parties.
Alan Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy @ The University of
Chicago, 1982
(Human Rights: Essay on Justification and Application. Pg. 230)
The required supplement is provided by the principle of intervening
action. According to this principle, when there is a casual connection
between some person As performing some action (or inaction) X and
some other person Cs incurring a certain harm Z, As moral responsibility
for Z is removed if, between X and Z, there intervenes some other action Y
of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and
who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness. The
reason for this removal is that Bs intervening action Y is more direct of proximate
cause of Z and, unlike As action (or inaction), Y is the sufficient condition of Z as it
actually occurs. An example of this principle may help to show its connection with
the absolutist thesis. Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly told that because
he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally
responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were
shaking the American Republic to its foundations. By the principle of
intervening action, however, it was Kings opponents who were
responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient
conditions of the riots and injuries. King might also have replied that the
Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was
the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the
other Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights
cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks.

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Critical Consequentialism
You should adopt critical consequentialism- examine every
possible alternative before taking unethical action. This is the
only way to avoid atrocities.
Blum, Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard, 2008
[Gabriella, The Laws of War and the Lesser Evil, Harvard Law School Faculty
Scholarship Series, Paper 24,http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard/faculty/papers/24,
Accessed 7/11/13]
To be truly justified, a net utilitarian calculation is insufficient; the actor,
instead, must be able to show that she had chosen the least possible
harmful mean that could avert the greater evil, without jeopardizing the
success of the military mission. This further condition is intended to supplement the
causal connection between the violation and the aversion of harm and to ensure
that the lesser evil justification is not used to mask unnecessary atrocities. The
domestic necessity defense does not require this condition; instead, it offers only a
vague proportionality test. The joint necessity-duress clause in the ICC Rome
Statute includes a similarly broader test, namely that the person acts necessarily
and reasonably to avoid this threat. Both the domestic necessity and the ICC
necessity operate only when the defendant has acted against an imminent threat.
But where a government chooses in an non-imminent, premeditated decision to
break the law, it supposedly can and should assess the full ramifications of the
violation, including by considering less harmful means, whether legal or illegal
themselves. In the Early Warning case, the High Court of Justice addressed the
possible use of loudspeakers as an alternative to the reliance on civilians. The IDFs
position, to recall, was that the use of loudspeakers would call attention to the
forces operating, thereby increasing the risk of all-round escalation. It is unclear to
what extent this alternative affected the final decision of the judges, and whether
the Court ultimately struck down the procedure despite deferring to the IDFs
judgment on this particular issue. The use of torture, so it is commonly agreed by
those who are willing to accept it as necessary under certain circumstances, must
be restricted to those cases where a similar outcome could not be achieved by any
other means. Consequently, if any less harmful measure (for instance, detention,
the taking of hostages, or even the threat of using torture) would have had a similar
probability of success, torture would be unjustifiable. This requirement would
also exclude certain atrocities from consideration under the humanitarian
necessity paradigm altogether. Consider, for instance, the crime of rape: It is
impossible to imagine any scenario in which the raping of an individual would be
the least harmful way to achieve a certain goal. If anything less than killing is
possible, there must be a range of less harmful means to avert the harm
the infliction of which is allowed under the law. The less harmful means
requirement casts the largest shadow over the attacks on Hiroshima, and
particularly, Nagasaki. Was it indeed impossible to avert Operation Downfall by
using less disastrous means? Or were some scientists, who argued that inviting UN
representatives for a live demonstration of the explosion in the desert, correct in
arguing that this option had to be tried out first, before dropping the bomb on
densely populated cities? Does the insistence of the Emperor on conditional

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surrender even after the widespread firebombing of Tokyo and the invasion of
Okinawa prove that there were no other options? Did the conditions set by the
Emperor warrant the continuation of the war? Could the use of nuclear weapons
ever be justified under the least harmful requirement condition?

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AT: Extinction Outweighs

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Extinction Images = Overestimate Risk

Their understanding of extinction scenarios is flawed. They
are only evaluating the images that extinction evokes, not the
probability of its occurrence.
Yudkowsky 6 (Eliezer; Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial
Intelligence Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks
Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic
8/31/06)
In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II
killed 60 million people. 107 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity's written history.
Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially
qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human
species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinkin g - enter into a "separate
existential risks.

magisterium". People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, "Well, maybe
the human species doesn't really deserve to survive."There is a saying in heuristics and biases

that people

do not evaluate events, but descriptions

of events - what is called non-extensional reasoning.

The extension of humanity's extinction includes the death of yourself, of your friends, of your family, of your loved
ones, of your city, of your country, of your political fellows. Yet people who would take great offense at a proposal to
wipe the country of Britain from the map, to kill every member of the Democratic Party in the U.S., to turn the city
of Paris to glass - who would feel still greater horror on hearing the doctor say that their child had cancer - these

"Extinction of humanity", as
words on paper, appears in fictional novels, or is discussed in philosophy books - it belongs to a
different context than the Spanish flu. We evaluate descriptions of events,
not extensions of events. The clich phrase end of the world invokes the
magisterium of myth and dream, of prophecy and apocalypse, of novels
and movies. The challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the
catastrophes being so huge, people snap into a different mode of thinking.
Human deaths are suddenly no longer bad, and detailed predictions
suddenly no longer require any expertise, and whether the story is told
with a happy ending or a sad ending is a matter of personal taste in
stories.
people will discuss the extinction of humanity with perfect calm.

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Tyranny of Survival
Sole focus on survival destroys value to life and is always used
to justify the worst atrocities.
Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973 (Daniel, The
Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In
the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals,

The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two

fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no
matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native
Japanese Americans were herded, without due process of law, into detention camps.
including the right to life.
decades,

This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in a general consensus that

survival of the Aryan race

was one of the official legitimizations of Nazism. Under the banner of
survival, the government of South Africa imposed a ruthless apartheid, heedless
of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has been one
of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival,
the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting
a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The

that survival has been evokes as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B.F. Skinner offers in Beyond
Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jaques Monod, in
Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost all known religious, ethical, and political system.

the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as grounds for
a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying
and beating children. Some have suggested we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided
In genetics,

medical efforts to find means to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases
as diabetes can live a normal life and thus procreate more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one

Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and

a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced
abortions and a denial of food to starving populations of nations which have not
can do no better than to cite Paul
in its holy name

enacted population-control policies For all these reasons, it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for

There seems to be no imaginable evil which some

group is not willing to inflict on another for the sake of survival, no rights,
liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress . It is easy, of course, to
recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their
aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland, to save it from
destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is
directed even at legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is
allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy
other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny of
survival as a value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other
values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a
destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing . We come here to the
fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if
survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other
rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life - then how will it be possible to
honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process,
destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of
survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then
there is no moral reason why an effort should be make to ensure that
survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories .
survival a "tyranny of survival."

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Hunger Outweighs Extinction

We have a moral obligation to distribute food equally even if
that leads to extinction.
Watson, Professor of Philosophy @ Washington University, 77
(Richard, World Hunger and Moral Obligation, p. 118-119)

That food sufficient for well-nourished survival is

the equal right of every human individual or nation is a specification of the
higher principle that everyone has equal right to the necessities of life. The
These arguments are morally spurious.

moral stress of the principle of equity is primarily on equal sharing, and only secondarily on what is being shared.

the moral action is to

distribute all food equally, whatever the consequences. This is the hard
line apparently drawn by such moralists as Immanuel Kant and Noam Chomskybut then, morality is hard.
The conclusion may be unreasonable (impractical and irrational in conventional terms),
but it is obviously moral. Nor should anyone purport surprise; it has always been understood that the
claims of moralityif taken seriouslysupersede those of conflicting reason. One
may even have to sacrifice ones life or ones nation to be moral in
situations where practical behavior would preserve it . For example, if a prisoner of
The higher moral principle is of human equity per se. Consequently,

war undergoing torture is to be a (perhaps dead) patriot even when reason tells him that collaboration will hurt no
one, he remains silent. Similarly, if one is to be moral, one distributes available food in equal shares (even

if

everyone then dies).

That an action is necessary to save ones life is no excuse for behaving

unpatriotically or immorally if one wishes to be a patriot or moral. No principle of morality absolves one of
behaving immorally simply to save ones life or nation. There is a strict analogy here between adhering to moral
principles for the sake of being moral, and adhering to Christian principles for the sake of being Christian. The
moral world contains pits and lions, but one looks always to the highest light. The ultimate test always harks to the
highest principlerecant or dieand

the going gets rough.

it is pathetic to profess morality if one quits when

I have put aside many questions of detailsuch as the mechanical problems of

distributing foodbecause detail does not alter the stark conclusion. If every human life is equal in value, then the
equal distribution of the necessities of life is an extremely high, if not the highest, moral duty. It is at least high
enough to override the excuse that by doing it one would lose ones life. But many people cannot accept the view

If everyone dies, then

there will be no realm of morality. Practically speaking, sheer survival comes first. One can
adhere to the principle of equity only if one exists. So it is rational to suppose that the
principle of survival is morally higher than the principle of equity . And though
that one must distribute equally even in f the nation collapses or all people die.

one might not be able to argue for unequal distribution of food to save a nationfor nations can come and goone
might well argue that unequal distribution is necessary for the survival of the human species. That is, some large
groupsay one-third of present world populationshould be at least well-nourished for human survival.

However, from an individual standpoint, the human specieslike the

nationis of no moral relevance. From a naturalistic standpoint, survival does come first; from
a moralistic standpointas indicated abovesurvival may have to be sacrificed.
In the milieu of morality, it is immaterial whether or not the human
species survives as a result of individual behavior.

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Consequentialism/Util Good

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Must Weigh Consequences

Must weigh consequences their moral tunnel vision is
complicit with the evil they criticize
Isaac, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University 2

(Jeffrey C, Dissent Magazine, 49(2), Ends, Means, and Politics, Spring, Proquest)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah
Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts
political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind
of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see
that the purity of ones intention does not ensure the achievement of what
one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail
impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond
the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world
of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of
powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from
the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially
immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose
certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as
much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the
effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most
significant. Just as the alignment with good may engender impotence, it is
often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This is the lesson of
communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be
sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the
effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic
and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this
judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes
arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

Failing to prevent a horrible outcome is just as bad as causing

it the aff is moral evasion.
Nielsen, philosophy prof @ U of Calgary - 93
(Kai, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber, 1993, p. 1702)
Forget the levity of the example and consider the case of the innocent fat man. If there really is no other way of
unsticking our fat man and if plainly, without blasting him out, everyone in the cave will drown, then, innocent or
not, he should be blasted out. This indeed overrides the principle that the innocent should never be deliberately
killed, but it does not reveal a callousness toward life, for the people involved are caught in a desperate situation in
which, if such extreme action is not taken, many lives will be lost and far greater misery will obtain. Moreover, the
people who do such a horrible thing or acquiesce in the doing of it are not likely to be rendered more callous about
human life and human suffering as a result. Its occurrence will haunt them for the rest of their lives and is as likely
as not to make them more rather than less morally sensitive. It is not even correct to say that such a desperate act
shows a lack of respect for persons. We are not treating the fat man merely as a means. The fat man's person-his
interests and rights are not ignored. Killing him is something which is undertaken with the greatest reluctance. It is
only when it is quite certain that there is no other way to save the lives of the others that such a violent course of
action is justifiably undertaken. Alan Donagan, arguing rather as Anscombe argues, maintains that "to use any
innocent man ill for the sake of some public good is directly to degrade him to being a mere means" and to do this
is of course to violate a principle essential to morality, that is, that human beings should never merely be treated as

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means but should be treated as ends in themselves (as persons worthy of respect)." But, as my above remarks
show, it need not be the case, and in the above situation it is not the case, that in killing such an innocent man we
are treating him merely as a means. The action is universalizable, all alternative actions which would save his life
are duly considered, the blasting out is done only as a last and desperate resort with the minimum of harshness and
indifference to his suffering and the like. It indeed sounds ironical to talk this way, given what is done to him. But if
such a terrible situation were to arise, there would always be more or less humane ways of going about one's grim
task. And in acting in the more humane ways toward the fat man, as we do what we must do and would have done
to ourselves were the roles reversed, we show a respect for his person. In so treating the fat man-not just to further
the public good but to prevent the certain death of a whole group of people (that is to prevent an even greater evil
than his being killed in this way)-the claims of justice are not overriden either, for each individual involved, if he is
reasonably correct, should realize that if he were so stuck rather than the fat man, he should in such situations be
blasted out. Thus, there is no question of being unfair. Surely we must choose between evils here, but is there
anything more reasonable, more morally appropriate, than choosing the lesser evil when doing or allowing some
evil cannot be avoided? That is, where there is no avoiding both and where our actions can determine whether a
greater or lesser evil obtains, should we not plainly always opt for the lesser evil? And is it not obviously a greater
evil that all those other innocent people should suffer and die than that the fat man should suffer and die? Blowing
up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns is still more
monstrous. The consequentialist is on strong moral ground here, and, if his reflective moral convictions do not
square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain reflective particular moral convictions of human beings, so
much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could even usefully and relevantly adapt

Consequentialism of the kind I have

been arguing for provides so persuasive "a theoretical basis for common
morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that
intuition, not theory, is corrupt."" Given the comprehensiveness,
plausibility, and overall rationality of consequentialism, it is not
unreasonable to override even a deeply felt moral conviction if it does not square
herethough for a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's.

with such a theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered

Anticonsequentialists often point to the

inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent, but cannot the
compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined
with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater
misery and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend
the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning
and such forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion. I say it is
evasive because rather than steeling himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a
horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity, he allows,
when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times worse. He tries to keep his
`moral purity' and avoid `dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and
moral convictions, that would be another matter indeed.

what Kierkegaard called `double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally evasive
way but this does not make it right.

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No Difference between Killing and Letting Die

Utilitarianism is the most ethical option- no difference between
killing and letting die.
Cummisky, Professor of Philosophy at Bates, 96
(David, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 131)

Finally, even if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot outweigh and
compensate for killing one-because dignity cannot be added and summed in this
way-this point still does not justify deontological constraints. On the extreme
interpretation, why would not killing one person be a stronger obligation
than saving two persons? If I am concerned with the priceless dignity of
each, it would seem that I may still save two; it is just that my reason cannot be
that the two compensate for the loss of one. Consider Hill's example of a priceless
object: If I can save two of three priceless statues only by destroying one, then I
cannot claim that saving two makes up for the loss of the one. But similarly, the
loss of the two is not outweighed by the one that was not destroyed.
Indeed, even if dignity cannot be simply summed up, how is the extreme
interpretation inconsistent with the idea that I should save as many priceless
objects as possible? Even if two do not simply outweigh and thus compensate for
the loss of the one, each is priceless; thus, I have good reason to save as
many as I can. In short, it is not clear how the extreme interpretation
justifies the killing/letting-die distinction or even how it conflicts with the
conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved, the better

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Policymakers Must Be Utilitarian

In the face of extinction risks, policymakers must be utilitarian.
George Kateb, Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
1992
(The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture., Pg.12. )

The main point, however, is that utilitarianism has a necessary pace in any
democratic country's normal political deliberations. But its advocates must
know its place, which ordinarily is only to help to decide what the theory of rights
leaves alone. When may rights be overridden by government? I have two sorts of
cases in mind: overriding a particular right of some persons for the sake of
preserving the same right of others, and overriding the same right of everyone for
the sake of what I will clumsily call "civilization values." An advocate of rights could
countenance, perhaps must countenance, the state's overriding of rights for these
two reasons. The subject is painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For
the state to override is, sacrificea right of some so that others may keep it. The
situation must be desperate. I have in mind, say, circumstances in which the
choice is between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all be
lost. The state (or some other agent) may kill some (or allow them to be
killed), if the only alternative is letting every-one die. It is the right to life
which most prominently figures in thinking about desperate situations. I
cannot see any resolution but to heed the precept that "numbers count."
Just as one may prefer saving one's own life to saving that of another
when both cannot be saved, so a third partylet us say, the statecan
(perhaps must) choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost
of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either group.
That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist
being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a third party is right to risk or sacrifice
the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser would
otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed.

Theres a distinction between public and private morality

Governments must make utilitarian calculations
Goodin, Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the
Social Sciences at the Australian National University, 95
(Robert E., Cambridge University Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg
63)

My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special

about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more
plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them adopt a form of utilitarianism
that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding
with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about
public officials and their situations that makes it both more necessary and more
desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first
the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices
under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices-

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public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course.
But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete
information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the
ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public
officials, in contrast, at relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their
choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know
are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most
often to most people as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all.
That is enough to allow public policy makers to use the utilitarian calculus
if they want to use it at all to choose general rules of conduct. Knowing
aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from
adopting each alternative possible general rule. But they cannot be sure what the
payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion. Their knowledge
of generalities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that.

Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are

impossible to know, only the outcome matters
Hinman, Professor of Ethics, 98
(Lawrence, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, p. 186)
When, for example, we want to assess the moral correctness of proposed
governmental legislation, we may well wish to set aside any question of
the intentions of the legislators. After all good laws may be passed for the
most venal of political motives, and bad legislation may be the outcome of
quite good intentions. Instead, we can concentrate solely on the question of what
effects the legislation may have on the people. When we make this shift, we
are not necessarily denying that individual intentions are important on
some
level, but rather confining our attention to a level on which those
intentions become largely irrelevant. This is particularly appropriate in the case
of policy decisions by governments, corporations, or other groups. In such cases
there may be a diversity of different intentions that one may want to treat
as essentially private matters hwen assessing the moral worth of the
proposed law, policy, or action. Therefore, rule utilitarianism's neglect of
intentions intuitively makes the most sense when we are assessing the
moral worth of some large-scale policy proposed by an entity consisting of
more than one individual.

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Nuclear War Outweighs

Nuclear war outweighs- survival is a prerequisite to other
values.
Nye, Professor of Political Science @ Harvard, 86

(Joseph S., Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security

Affairs; Nuclear Ethics pg. 45-46)
Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival
of the species? Is not all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world
as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we are required to
undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the
authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the
highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he will not betray. But for a
civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not survivors
to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth
betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral
disarmament that forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing
the chances of both)"?74 How one judges the issue of ends can be affected by how
one poses the questions. If one asks "what is worth a billion lives (or the survival of
the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose
one asks, "is it possible to imagine any threat to our civilization and values that
would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten thousand to one in a
thousand for a specific period?" Then there are several plausible answers, including
a democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond
mere survival. When we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the
fact that they often conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make
one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little else.
Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but
that does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value.
Few people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or
they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very
high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some
degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and
enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a
justifiable topic of both prudential and moral reasoning.

Utilitarianism is the only moral option in a nuclear age.

Nye, Professor of political science @ Harvard, 86

(Joseph S., Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security

Affairs Nuclear Ethics pg. 18-19)
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by
contemplating a hypothetical case.34 Imagine that you are visiting a Central
American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain
is about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall.
When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's
men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are

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told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all
have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you
that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die.
He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you.
Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will
you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play
his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both
traditions. Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would
refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an
innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if
there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing
one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a
terrorists' nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate
egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more
important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a
consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral
means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do absolutist
approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear
weapons? "Do what is right though the world should perish" was a difficult
principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there
is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then.
Now that it may be literally possible in the nuclear age, it seems more
than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier
burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.

Risk of extinction shatters the framework for evaluating

impacts- the impact is infinite and must be avoided at any
cost.
Schell 82
[Jonathan Schell 1982 Fate of the Earth pp. 93-96]

To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation

just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To
begin with, we know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur, the
adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use all their weapons, the
global effects in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are
not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand
them without breaking down catastrophically. These are all substantial reasons for
supposing that mankind will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that
extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm our fear and to reduce
our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time we are compelled to admit that there
may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global
effects, including effects of which we as yet unaware, may be severe, that the
ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be
extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and are forced to make our
decisions in a state of uncertainty. If we wish to act to save our species, we
have to muster our resolve in spite of our awareness that the life of the species may
not now in fact be jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore the peril, we
have to admit that we do so in the knowledge that the species may be in danger of

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imminent self-destruction. When the existence of nuclear weapons was made
known, thoughtful people everywhere in the world realized that if the great powers
entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner or later face the
possibility of extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international
agreements preventing it an arms race would probably occur. They knew that the
path of nuclear armament was a dead end for mankind. The discovery of the energy
in mass of "the basic power of the universe" and of a means by which man could
release that energy altered the relationship between man and the source of his life,
the earth. In the shadow of this power, the earth became small and the life of the
human species doubtful. In that sense, the question of human extinction has been
on the political agenda of the world ever since the first nuclear weapon was
detonated, and there was no need for the world to build up its present tremendous
arsenals before starting to worry about it. At just what point the species crossed, or
will have crossed, the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to
destroy itself and actually having the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any
second, is not precisely knowable. But it is clear that at present, with some twenty
thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in existence, and with more being
added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the
zone of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a significance
that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than that of
any other risk and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into
account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the framework of
life; extinction would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of
some purpose but an abyss in which all human purpose would be drowned
for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless,
eternal defeat on the same footing as risk that we run in the ordinary
conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of human history .
To employ a mathematician's analogy, we can say that although the risk of
extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and
a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a
holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if
we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever
get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the
difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will
bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same,
and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as
though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our
species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand
before a mystery, and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We
are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder
should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution,
and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without delay to
withdraw the threat we now post to the world and to ourselves.