Readings
Texts
- "Bad Blood": A Case Study of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project
- Stephen Goldby, Saul Krugman, M. H. Pappworth, and Geoffrey Edsall: The Willowbrook Letters, "Criticism and Defense"; Paul Ramsey, "Judgment on Willowbrook"
- Immanuel Kant, "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals", Second Section (excerpt)
Notes
Cases
Synopsis
As we learned with the Justice and Rights arguments against utilitarianism, under many (perhaps all) utilitarian theories, sacrificing one individual's (insert one: happiness; pleasure; best interests; or preferences--and I must add the number of people who seem to have no clue on the differences between these is distressing given all the time we've spent on them!) should it be thusly outweighed by many others is morally permitted. That is, we do the right thing throwing the Christian to the lions for the entertainment doing so provides tens of thousands of Romans. Alternatively, we do the right thing harvesting an otherwise healthy person's organs if doing so permits us to save the lives of, say, five others.
To be sure, it might be objected that these are fanciful, fabricated objections to utilitarianism. We no longer throw Christians to hungry lions, or even well-fed lions. Throwing Christians is simply out. Likewise, we don't harvest otherwise healthy people for their organs, setting aside deeply troubling allegations of a Chinese market in the organs from executed prisoners.
Yet we have a long history of engaging in precisely the sort of utilitarian "good of the many outweighs the good of the few", where 'few' here ought to be replaced with some variation of 'marginalized and vulnerable'. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments are one example, the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments another. We will take up the deeply troubling history of human experimentation next time.
At this point we must ask, is there an alternative to utilitarianism which lacks these morally problematic implications?
Deontology is, like utilitarianism, a cluster of theories which share important common elements. Our sole example of a deontological theory this semester will be Kantian Ethical Theory, named after the philosopher Immanuel Kant. To understand KET, we discovered, it is important to understand Kant's objections to UET.
Kant distinguished between Hypothetical Oughts and Categorical Oughts. A Hypothetical Ought has the form of a conditional, and every implication of UET is a Hypothetical Ought of the form:
If you would maximize utility, then perform action X.
Hypothetical Oughts can never count as moral oughts for Kant in virtue of their logical form. In particular, Hypothetical Oughts are binding only to the extent that we have the appropriate desires. To see what this means, consider that the conditional
If P then Q
is true even if the antecedent, P, is false. (In general, a conditional is only false when its antecedent is true but its consequent is false.)
Hence if I have no desire to maximize utility, I have no reason to perform action X. The conditional
If you would maximize utility, then perform action X.
is still true, provided that I fail to have the desire to maximize utility.
But moral duties, for Kant, are absolute. That is to say, moral duties must bind unconditionally. So no Hypothetical Ought could be a moral duty. The puzzle is to understand how we can infer Categorical Oughts.
Just how does Kantian Ethical Theory generate (imply) Categorical Oughts? To answer that question, we consider two formulations of the Categorical Imperative. The first formulation, in particular, is used as the basis of a so-called Kantian Deduction to show, for example, that everyone should tell the truth--i.e., lying is morally wrong. A Kantian Deduction can be schematized as follows. First, a proposed course of action is summarized in a brief description. This is the maxim referred to in the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Examples include 'I should lie', 'I should steal', and 'I should kill'. The Categorical Imperative, at least in its first formulation, is a criterion of universality. The biblical 'golden rule' is likewise a criterion of universality; there are many other examples. Roughly put, the Categorical Imperative requires that our actions be consistent. What Kant noticed was that acts like lying, stealing, and killing succeed only in contexts where the agent performing the actions is the only one performing the actions. If everyone lies, then the liar's action cannot succeed in its goal--similarly for stealing and killing. Another way to put the point is this: actions like lying, stealing, and killing are self-defeating.
With the maxim in hand, then, we universalize it to get 'everyone should lie', 'everyone should steal', 'everyone should kill'. Our job at this stage is to see if the maxim is consistent with its universal; is it possible to generate a logical contradiction? For maxims like 'I should lie' it is, since the success of my lying hinges completely on others not lying. Hence, by Reductio ad Absurdum, the maxim must be rejected. It is false. But if, for example, it is false that I should lie, then it follows that I should not lie.
What contradiction we get depends on the case at hand. But it is important to appreciate that we get a logical contradiction--something of the form, 'Q and not-Q'. Often students get confused and think that what Kant is saying is that if everyone lies, the world will be a very bad place and people wont get along very well. That is not Kant's point. That is how a Utilitarian might argue, and Kant was no friend of Utilitarianism. Kant denies that consequences have anything to do with morality. Rather, morality is a matter of absolute duty as dictated by logic.
Kantian Ethical Theory is thus a fascinating theory insofar as Kant has come as close as anyone to wedding logic and ethics: The immoral action is illogical in the sense that it is self-defeating.
Next today I suggested that in application the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative is usually more helpful than the first. There are various ways to interpret what it means to treat someone as an end, and never as a means only, which is the constraint at the very core of the second formulation. On one account, to treat someone as an end and not as a means only is to respect their interests as if they were your own. On another account, it seems clear that we use someone when we manipulate or cheat them. So the idea would be that we avoid treating them as a means only to the extent that we respect their autonomy. That is, we respect their right to make their own decisions and choices in treating a person as an end in themselves--as, that is to say, a rational agent whose ends are their own to choose.
- The Respect for Interests Interpretation, whereby we treat someone as an end when we respect their interests--that is, when we take their best interests as if they were our own. This is particularly useful when we are concerned with children, since it is not clear children have the capacity to exercise autonomy in the same way adults do.
- The Respect for Autonomy Interpretation, whereby we treat someone as an end when we respect their capacity to make choices for themselves by not, in particular, manipulating their choices, using them, or otherwise objectifying them.
Next time we will take up a Reflective Equilibrium argument against Kantian Ethical Theory and turn to examining specific moral cases where it and utilitarianism sharply diverge.