Another popular charge is that classic utilitarianism demands too much, because it requires us to do acts that are or should be moral options (neither obligatory nor forbidden). (Scheffler 1982) For example, imagine that my old shoes are serviceable but dirty, so I want a new pair of shoes that costs $100. I could wear my old shoes and give the $100 to a charity that will use my money to save someone else’s life. It would seem to maximize utility for me to give the $100 to the charity. If it is morally wrong to do anything other than what maximizes utility, then it is morally wrong for me to buy the shoes. But buying the shoes does not seem morally wrong. It might be morally better to give the money to charity, but such contributions seem supererogatory, that is, above and beyond the call of duty. Of course, there are many more cases like this. When I watch television, I always (or almost always) could do more good by helping others, but it does not seem morally wrong to watch television. When I choose to teach philosophy rather than working for CARE or the Peace Corps, my choice probably fails to maximize utility overall. If we were required to maximize utility, then we would have to make very different choices in many areas of our lives. The requirement to maximize utility, thus, strikes many people as too demanding because it interferes with the personal decisions that most of us feel should be left up to the individual.
Some utilitarians respond by arguing that we really are morally required to change our lives so as to do a lot more to increase overall utility (see Kagan 1989, P. Singer 1993, and Unger 1996). Such hard-liners claim that most of what most people do is morally wrong, because most people rarely maximize utility. Some such wrongdoing might be blameless when agents act from innocent or even desirable motives, but it is still supposed to be moral wrongdoing. Opponents of utilitarianism find this claim implausible, but it is not obvious that their counter-utilitarian intuitions are reliable or well-grounded (Murphy 2000, chs. 1-4; cf. Mulgan 2001).
Other utilitarians blunt the force of the demandingness objection by limiting utilitarianism to what people morally ought to do. Even if we morally ought to maximize utility, it need not be morally wrong to fail to maximize utility. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued that an act is morally wrong only when both it fails to maximize utility and its agent is liable to punishment for the failure (Mill 1861). It does not always maximize utility to punish people for failing to maximize utility (cf. Sinnott-Armstrong 2005). Thus, on this view, it is not always morally wrong to fail to do what one morally ought to do. If Mill is correct about this, then utilitarians can say that we ought to give much more to charity, but we are not required or obliged to do so, and failing to do so is not morally wrong.
Many utilitarians still want to avoid the claim that we morally ought to give so much to charity. One way around this claim uses a rule-utilitarian theory of what we morally ought to do. If it costs too much to internalize rules implying that we ought to give so much to charity, then, according to such rule-utilitarianism, it is not true that we ought to give so much to charity (Hooker 2000, ch. 8).
Another route follows an agent-relative theory of value. If there is more value in benefiting one’s family and friends than there is disvalue in letting strangers die (without killing them), then spending resources on family and friends would maximize the good. A problem is that such consequentialism would seem to imply that we morally ought not to contribute those resources to charity, although such contributions seem at least permissible.
More personal leeway could also be allowed by deploying the legal notion of proximate causation. When a starving stranger would stay alive if and only if one contributed to a charity, contributing to the charity still need not be the proximate cause of the stranger’s life, and failing to contribute need not be the proximate cause of his or her death. Thus, if an act is morally right when it includes the most net good in its proximate consequences, then it might not be morally wrong either to contribute to the charity or to fail to do so.
Yet another way to reach this conclusion is to give up maximization and to hold instead that we morally ought to do what creates enough utility. This position is often described as satisficing consequentialism (Slote 1984). According to satisficing consequentialism, it is not morally wrong to fail to contribute to a charity if one contributes enough to other charities and if the money or time that one could contribute does create enough good, so it is not just wasted. (For criticisms, see Bradley forthcoming.) A related position is progressive consequentialism, which holds that we morally ought to improve the world or make it better than it would be if we did nothing, but we don’t have to improve it as much as we can (Elliot and Jamieson, forthcoming). Both satisficing and progressive consequentialism allow us to devote some of our time and money to personal projects that do not maximize overall good.
Opponents still object that all such consequentialist theories are misdirected. When I decide to visit a friend instead of working for a charity, I can know that my act is not immoral even if I have not calculated that the visit will create enough overall good or that it will improve the world. These critics hold that friendship requires us to do certain favors for friends without weighing our friends’ welfare impartially against the welfare of strangers. Similarly, if I need to choose between saving my drowning wife and saving a drowning stranger, it would be “one thought too many” (Williams 1981) for me to calculate the consequences of each act. I morally should save my wife straightaway without calculating utilities.
In response, utilitarians can remind critics that the principle of utility is intended as only a criterion of right and not as a decision procedure, so utilitarianism does not imply that people ought to calculate utilities before acting (Railton 1984). Consequentialists can also allow the special perspective of a friend or spouse to be reflected in agent-relative value assessments (Sen 1982, Broome 1991, Portmore 2001, 2003) or probability assessments (Jackson 1991). It remains controversial, however, whether any form of consequentialism can adequately incorporate common moral intuitions about friendship.
Referência
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Consequentialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), §6.
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Tags: conseqüencialismo, Peter Singer, Peter Unger, supererrogação, utilitarismo
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