This is my reply to an article by Dr. R. Scott Smith entitled:
There definitely is a place for appeals to utility in moral reasoning. E.g., when crafting public policy, we should consider the likely consequences of a proposed action, even when a deontological principle clearly applies.
So when Christian women consider the consequences of their decision to have an abortion (i.e., the child goes immediately to heaven and all chance they might end up in hell is infallibly preempted), then it is clear that the abortion has greater moral good, while allowing the child to grow up, gain freewill, and thus open up the possibility of being tortured in flames forever, is clearly immoral. Especially given that the aborted baby's entry to heaven is necessarily approved by God (how else would he let them in)?
You couldn't be immoral to murder anybody, because according to Job 14:5, God has set an unchangeable number of days for a person to live. If you murder somebody, you are necessarily carrying out god's will on what happens to them when their number of days are expired. Gee, I never knew that obeying the will of God was immoral!
After all, people have to live with such decisions. Moreover, utilitarianism appeals to people, especially in secular societies, as apparently being morally neutral. There is no appeal to God or some other set of values to determine what is moral.
Fair enough.
However, what gets to count as a “good” or “bad” consequence in the first place? Who gets to decide that?
In America, the "who" are the people who decide whether to vote on proposed legislation. In certain parts of Africa, it is a witch-doctor.
According to whom is something (or someone) more valuable than another?
See above.
Biases easily could enter the calculation here.
It would be impossible if they didn't, since morality is ultimately subjective. There is no such thing as moral neutrality in that group of people who desire to cast a vote about proposed legislation.
To make such judgments seems to presuppose some outside standard, beyond utility.
No, making such judgments presupposes the basic morality of the individual that they have by reason of genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning. Many people mistake such morals as objective, but they do, in fact, spring from those two sources, no need to posit any moral source that is "above humanity".
Another issue is that utilitarianism seems inadequate in terms of how it treats motives.
Indeed, because morality is relative, there is not going to be any system that will be satisfactory to everybody. Some people simply prioritize the long-term and others the short-term, and history tells us nothing if it doesn't tell us that we are incapable of creating moral utopia. There's enough commonality to explain creation of different moral groups (nations, states, towns, clubs, churches) but not enough commonality to justify efforts to unite the whole world in morality. Exactly what we'd expect on naturalism.
Yet, surely they are morally important. If someone kills another, it makes a major difference if it was done intentionally or accidentally. We rightly recognize that difference in the law.
But only for people who care about the long-term stability of society, not for those of more independent persuasion. That's a lot of people. Most people do in fact go faster than the speed limit, cheat on their taxes, and many refrain from calling the police if they have seen a crime, judging the judicial system inadequate to meet their needs.
Relatedly, utilitarianism undermines acts of moral supererogation, ones that are heroic and praiseworthy, yet not required. Suppose someone is jogging but notices another person in danger of being attacked by a third person with a knife. While we should expect that jogger to at least call for help (call the police or cry out, to scare off the attacker), it would be above and beyond the call of duty for that jogger to fight off the attacker and save the would-be victim. Yet, on utilitarianism, that act would be obligatory if it would result overall in net good consequences.
Then have fun refuting utilitarian advocates who think their system covers all possible moral situations. Count me out.
Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism makes net utility the basis for what is moral.
That's why it cannot be the answer to all moral situations, as most people do not agree that whatever is best in the long term for the majority of people is best. People will flout the law for their own personal moral reasons often without caring whether this would help or hurt the larger concerns.
Consider again our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good.
Murder is not always wrong, its a question of whether the law which criminalize certain types of killing might end up operating to create a greater injustice, which discussion is not pointless merely because morals are relative. We live with each other hear on earth, we don't need to claim we speak for God in order to legitimately seek what we believe is moral justice.
If you think rape is always immoral, then you are saying God is morally wrong. See the Good News Translation of Deuteronomy 21:14. Christian translators would hardly render the Hebrew as "forced her to have intercourse with you" if they could have grammatically justified any less rape-sounding translation.
If the good consequences of a murder outweigh the bad, then that act would be justified and even obligatory.
But whether the good consequences DO outweigh the bad, is a moral judgment call that not even Christians can agree on.
The same goes for rape, whether under act or rule utilitarianism.
No, you only establish this "core" value by arbitrarily preempting the opinion held by remorseless rapists. That's not very objective or clinical, that's nothing more than "those people are yucky so their opinion doesn't count." And there are plenty of women who have a "rape fetish", and there is counseling available for rape victims who orgasmed during the rape. But the victim having an orgasm during the rape probably isn't something you hear about in the mass media. But an atheist could pounce on that as a proof that either your god doesn't exist, or the god who exists is a barbarian. But that's not difficult anyway: girls become capable of bearing children when they reach 12 years of age. The male's sex drive is strongest during their teen years. Why? Might it be that your god seriously thought that having a family and working the farm was far more important than literacy, college and capitalism?
But these results clearly are deeply mistaken, to say the least. If this justification held, it could be moral to rape another person,
You don't have an argument indicating that rape is objectively immoral. You just blindly presuppose that is the case because you know most people will agree with it. But popularity doesn't equal truth. You have to ask WHY most people think rape is wrong. That's easy, the way they were raised: most of us were not raised to take advantage of other people., and we were raised to believe that we shouldn't be subjecting somebody else to misery unless only a greater evil would occur without it, so since the satisfaction of the rapists sexual drive is not viewed by most people as a high priority, while their being born and raised in a democratic nation tells them the girl doesn't deserve to be raped, most people naturally eschew rape.
or murder a racial minority person who is protesting peacefully for civil rights.
There is no doubt that such a statement as this will garner an awful lot of support for you because America as a whole is steaming over the white cops killing black men. But again, you have nothing but popularity on your side. Once again, you cannot prove the objective immorality of a racist cop killing a black man in a way contrary to the applicable state and federal laws.
But, we deeply know such acts are wrong; otherwise, why would there be such uproars against these acts?
But WHY do we "deeply know" such acts are wrong? Gee, is it sheer coincidence that our viewpoint on such things is in harmony with the way most of us were raised, and in harmony with the kind of mammalian genetic predisposition most of us are born with (i.e., don't do something which threatens the survival of the group)?
Furthermore, your implied belief that murder is objectively immoral is disproven from the bible, in which God takes personal responsibility for all murders (Deuteronomy 32:39, Job 14:5, see Deut. 28:15-63). You don't have to be a hyper-Calvinist to argue as a Christian that god is responsible for evil and works it to his own good. That logically requires that when some white cop guns down a black man, God was more responsible for why the atoms in the cops brain did what they did, than the cop himself. Biblical statements about God's omnipresence contradict biblical statements supporting libertarian freewill. There is no place God is absent from, and that includes brain synapses. Unless you wish to argue that ancient Semitic peoples tended to include exaggeration in their religious texts? Gee, that wouldn't create a serious problem for inerrancy, would it? A Bible whose statements about God often exaggerate him? How about a Court of law declaring the Affidavit of some witness "inerrant" despite its containing exaggerations?
Likewise, justice would be reduced to whatever is the result of the calculation. A rape or murder would be just in a society that is predominately one race if that act would maximize the overall benefits for the majority. Yet, if these acts can be just on this moral system, we have lost justice.
No, we'd have lost our current sense of justice. Once again, your arguments blindly and wrongly presuppose that you DO have unchallengable "core" moral elements. You don't. You just have a lot of mammals in the world whose genetic predispositions are similar enough to explain their grouping together, but not similar enough to create moral utopia...exactly what we'd expect in a godless mammalian world where trying to stay alive and thrive is the ultimate purpose.
Indeed, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, seem to be intrinsically so.
And there you go again appealing to the emotions of the reader, but surely an apologist can do better to prove objective morality, than by remarking that certain morals "seem" intrinsic.
But "intrinsic" doesn't have to imply transcendance. Morals become lodged in our minds as we are raised by our caregivers. I'm not seeing why that naturalistic explanation is leaving anything unexplained.
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