Should euthanasia be legalized? Should abortion be made legal? Should ecocide be criminalized? Should half of the world’s wealth owned by 1 percent of the world population be distributed? Some of you might believe the answers to these questions are evident. Those very controversial matters can be argued in both ways as the answers to these questions are dependent on the values of each individual and is thus subjective.
Why is it that 5% of women in reproductive age live in countries that prohibit abortion altogether and 36% in countries that allow abortion on request (varies on the gestational week). These statistics show a difference in opinion regarding the morality of abortion all around the world. For more interesting insights about this topic, this website is ideal. Ethical convictions are, amongst other factors, probably why our world is not settled on abortion. Whenever a law is being proposed, drafted and voted, the debate all boils down to ethical preferences. Ethics in the legal context helps the legislator to find the answer to “What considerations make this law good?” and “How should we go about legislating in a morally good manner?” These questions are all the more important in the legal context as law objectifies judgments of right and wrong, making them no longer purely matters of opinion. This paper will explain the essence of the utilitarian theory of ethics and Kantian ethics.
Utilitarian theories of ethics are consequentialist moral theories, which means that the assessment of the rightfulness of law is based on the consequences resulting from the law. Jeremy Bentham (1791-1831) a proponent of this approach, believed that only two fundamental consequences result from an action; pleasure and pain. From this, Bentham built a criterion to evaluate the rightfulness of an action; utility. Utility helps to evaluate the tendency to contribute to the general happiness of the community the action should benefit. Utility aims at maximizing the overall good, not only the good of the moral agent. When the parliament votes a law, it will look at the utility resulting from the law, adding up the pleasure and subtracting the pain resulting from it. The question resulting from this is; how to measure pain and pleasure? Bentham set 7 parameters to be taken into consideration when measuring it; 1) Intensity, 2) certainty (certainty that if x is enforced y will result), 3) duration, 4) fecundity (if x is enforced, it will result in further other pleasure), 5) nearness (how soon the benefits will result after completing the action), 6) purity (how/is the pleasure ‘contaminated’ by pain?) 7) extend (how many people will benefit from the action). Bentham uses these factors to characterize pleasure, measure it and then add up pleasure and subtract pain resulting form every moral decision in order to quantify happiness and thereby assessing the utility of the action to determine whether the consequences of it are morally wrong. Although his work will not be dived into for the sake of clarity, it must be born in mind the John Stuart Mill, Bentham’s student, considerably contributed to his professor’s theory of Utilitarianism.
Classical Utilitarianism as proposed by Bentham, was highly criticized by Contemporary Consequentialists. The way happiness is being calculated fails to align with retributive (distribution of reward and punishment) and distributive justice (distribution of benefits ex: health benefits and taxation). Here is an illustration of utilitarian theory’s flaws; in a world where a rich minority is very rich, thereby scoring very high in happiness (scoring 100 units of happiness each) and poor majority is average poor (30 units of happiness), is worth more utility than a world where everyone experiences 40 units worth of happiness. John Rawls noticed this nonegalitarian tendency in Bentham’s Utilitarian theory and argued that Classical Utilitarianism fails to treat persons as individuals but ends themselves. He therefore concluded that inequalities can only be justified if it benefits the worst-off (the most disadvantaged ones without the law) in society.
The issue pointed out by Rawls could not have been encountered in a Kantian/deontological theory of moral ethics, since the assessment of moral rightfulness is not consequentialist in deontological theories. In this theory, the reason for the action alone lays down the moral.
Any reason underlining actions must be led by goodwill, acting from duty. Kant contrasts goodwill with self-interested-deed which has no moral worth. To distinguish a self-interested deed from a moral action, Kant poses the following question “What drives the person to act in a particular way?” According to Kant, a person acting out of desire/duty to perform a good deed acts in line with the moral law. To understand what moral law is, law must be dived into a distinction Kant established, namely between hypothetical and categorical imperative (command, order). A hypothetical imperative is a prerequisite that must be met for the sole purpose to satisfy a certain desire. The imperative is conditional to the wish to fulfill the desire. For example, you must go to the doctor only if you desire to get cured. A categorical imperative must always be met. A categorical imperative is always binding, it is unconditional because its applicability is not conditional to the will to satisfy a desire. Acting in line with moral law is acting in line with categorical imperatives. To know whether an action is good it must be in line with the categorical imperative, but when is that the case? When does one act in such a way? On the one hand, Kant explained that when in a dilemma, one should ask oneself if one would like for this maxim to become a universal law. On the other, it must be born in mind that humanity should be treated as an end and not simply as mean. The latter moral rule entails that a human being can be a mean, but to not be reduced to a mean it must be treated like an autonomous, rational human being. When legislating, Kant would advocate for a law that would be applicable as if it were universal and that treats the persons bound by the law as an end and not simply reduced to a mean.
Although these theories differ in essence, the same conclusions can be reached through a different reasoning.
Comments