An implication of this commitment is that whenever people want to buy something for themselves or for a friend or family member, they must first determine whether they could create more well-being by donating their money to help unknown strangers who are seriously ill or impoverished.
If more good can be done by helping strangers than by purchasing things for oneself or people one personally cares about, then act utilitarianism requires us to use the money to help strangers in need. Almost everyone, however, believes that we have special moral duties to people who are near and dear to us.
As a result, most people would reject the notion that morality requires us to treat people we love and care about no differently from people who are perfect strangers as absurd.
This issue is not merely a hypothetical case. In a famous article, Peter Singer defends the view that people living in affluent countries should not purchase luxury items for themselves when the world is full of impoverished people. According to Singer, a person should keep donating money to people in dire need until the donor reaches the point where giving to others generates more harm to the donor than the good that is generated for the recipients.
Critics claim that the argument for using our money to help impoverished strangers rather than benefiting ourselves and people we care about only proves one thing—that act utilitarianism is false. There are two reasons that show why it is false. First, it fails to recognize the moral legitimacy of giving special preferences to ourselves and people that we know and care about.
Second, since pretty much everyone is strongly motivated to act on behalf of themselves and people they care about, a morality that forbids this and requires equal consideration of strangers is much too demanding. It asks more than can reasonably be expected of people. There are two ways in which act utilitarians can defend their view against these criticisms. First, they can argue that critics misinterpret act utilitarianism and mistakenly claim that it is committed to supporting the wrong answer to various moral questions.
Because they do not maximize utility, these wrong answers would not be supported by act utilitarians and therefore, do nothing to weaken their theory. Unless critics can prove that common sense moral beliefs are correct the criticisms have no force.
Act utilitarians claim that their theory provides good reasons to reject many ordinary moral claims and to replace them with moral views that are based on the effects of actions. People who are convinced by the criticisms of act utilitarianism may decide to reject utilitarianism entirely and adopt a different type of moral theory.
This judgment, however, would be sound only if act utilitarianism were the only type of utilitarian theory.
This is what defenders of rule utilitarianism claim. They argue that rule utilitarianism retains the virtues of a utilitarian moral theory but without the flaws of the act utilitarian version.
Unlike act utilitarians, who try to maximize overall utility by applying the utilitarian principle to individual acts, rule utilitarians believe that we can maximize utility only by setting up a moral code that contains rules. The correct moral rules are those whose inclusion in our moral code will produce better results more well-being than other possible rules.
Once we determine what these rules are, we can then judge individual actions by seeing if they conform to these rules. The principle of utility, then, is used to evaluate rules and is not applied directly to individual actions.
Once the rules are determined, compliance with these rules provides the standard for evaluating individual actions. Rule utilitarianism sounds paradoxical. It says that we can produce more beneficial results by following rules than by always performing individual actions whose results are as beneficial as possible. This suggests that we should not always perform individual actions that maximize utility.
How could this be something that a utilitarian would support? In spite of this paradox, rule utilitarianism possesses its own appeal, and its focus on moral rules can sound quite plausible.
The rule utilitarian approach to morality can be illustrated by considering the rules of the road. More specific rules that require stopping at lights, forbid going faster than 30 miles per hour, or prohibit driving while drunk do not give drivers the discretion to judge what is best to do. They simply tell drivers what to do or not do while driving. The reason why a more rigid rule-based system leads to greater overall utility is that people are notoriously bad at judging what is the best thing to do when they are driving a car.
A rule utilitarian can illustrate this by considering the difference between stop signs and yield signs. Stop signs forbid drivers to go through an intersection without stopping, even if the driver sees that there are no cars approaching and thus no danger in not stopping. A yield sign permits drivers to go through without stopping unless they judge that approaching cars make it dangerous to drive through the intersection.
The key difference between these signs is the amount of discretion that they give to the driver. The stop sign is like the rule utilitarian approach. It tells drivers to stop and does not allow them to calculate whether it would be better to stop or not. The yield sign is like act utilitarianism. It permits drivers to decide whether there is a need to stop. Act utilitarians see the stop sign as too rigid because it requires drivers to stop even when nothing bad will be prevented.
The result, they say, is a loss of utility each time a driver stops at a stop sign when there is no danger from oncoming cars. Rule utilitarians will reply that they would reject the stop sign method a if people could be counted on to drive carefully and b if traffic accidents only caused limited amounts of harm. But, they say, neither of these is true. Because people often drive too fast and are inattentive while driving because they are, for example, talking, texting, listening to music, or tired , we cannot count on people to make good utilitarian judgments about how to drive safely.
In addition, the costs i. Accident victims including drivers may be killed, injured, or disabled for life. For these reasons, rule utilitarians support the use of stop signs and other non-discretionary rules under some circumstances.
Rule utilitarians generalize from this type of case and claim that our knowledge of human behavior shows that there are many cases in which general rules or practices are more likely to promote good effects than simply telling people to do whatever they think is best in each individual case. This does not mean that rule utilitarians always support rigid rules without exceptions.
Some rules can identify types of situations in which the prohibition is over-ridden. The rules of the road do not tell drivers when to drive or what their destination should be for example. Overall then, rule utilitarian can allow departures from rules and will leave many choices up to individuals.
In such cases, people may act in the manner that looks like the approach supported by act utilitarians. Nonetheless, these discretionary actions are permitted because having a rule in these cases does not maximize utility or because the best rule may impose some constraints on how people act while still permitting a lot of discretion in deciding what to do. As discussed earlier, critics of act utilitarianism raise three strong objections against it.
According to these critics, act utilitarianism a approves of actions that are clearly wrong; b undermines trust among people, and c is too demanding because it requires people to make excessive levels of sacrifice. Rule utilitarians tend to agree with these criticisms of act utilitarianism and try to explain why rule utilitarianism is not open to any of these objections.
Critics of act utilitarianism claim that it allows judges to sentence innocent people to severe punishments when doing so will maximize utility, allows doctors to kill healthy patients if by doing so, they can use the organs of one person to save more lives, and allows people to break promises if that will create slightly more benefits than keeping the promise.
Rule utilitarians say that they can avoid all these charges because they do not evaluate individual actions separately but instead support rules whose acceptance maximizes utility. To see the difference that their focus on rules makes, consider which rule would maximize utility: a a rule that allows medical doctors to kill healthy patients so that they can use their organs for transplants that will save a larger number of patients who would die without these organs; or b a rule that forbids doctors to remove the organs of healthy patients in order to benefit other patients.
Although more good may be done by killing the healthy patient in an individual case, it is unlikely that more overall good will be done by having a rule that allows this practice. If a rule were adopted that allows doctors to kill healthy patients when this will save more lives, the result would be that many people would not go to doctors at all. A rule utilitarian evaluation will take account of the fact that the benefits of medical treatment would be greatly diminished because people would no longer trust doctors.
People who seek medical treatment must have a high degree of trust in doctors. If they had to worry that doctors might use their organs to help other patients, they would not, for example, allow doctors to anesthetize them for surgery because the resulting loss of consciousness would make them completely vulnerable and unable to defend themselves. Thus, the rule that allows doctors to kill one patient to save five would not maximize utility.
The same reasoning applies equally to the case of the judge. In order to have a criminal justice system that protects people from being harmed by others, we authorize judges and other officials to impose serious punishments on people who are convicted of crimes. The purpose of this is to provide overall security to people in their jurisdiction, but this requires that criminal justice officials only have the authority to impose arrest and imprisonment on people who are actually believed to be guilty.
They do not have the authority to do whatever they think will lead to the best results in particular cases. Whatever they do must be constrained by rules that limit their power. Act utilitarians may sometimes support the intentional punishment of innocent people, but rule utilitarians will understand the risks involved and will oppose a practice that allows it. Rule utilitarians offer a similar analysis of the promise keeping case.
They explain that in general, we want people to keep their promises even in some cases in which doing so may lead to less utility than breaking the promise. The reason for this is that the practice of promise-keeping is a very valuable.
It enables people to have a wide range of cooperative relationships by generating confidence that other people will do what they promise to do. If we knew that people would fail to keep promises whenever some option arises that leads to more utility, then we could not trust people who make promises to us to carry them through. In each of these cases then, rule utilitarians can agree with the critics of act utilitarianism that it is wrong for doctors, judges, and promise-makers to do case by case evaluations of whether they should harm their patients, convict and punish innocent people, and break promises.
The rule utilitarian approach stresses the value of general rules and practices, and shows why compliance with rules often maximizes overall utility even if in some individual cases, it requires doing what produces less utility.
Rule utilitarians see the social impact of a rule-based morality as one of the key virtues of their theory. The three cases just discussed show why act utilitarianism undermines trust but rule utilitarianism does not. Fundamentally, in the cases of doctors, judges, and promise-keepers, it is trust that is at stake.
Being able to trust other people is extremely important to our well-being. As a result, people would be less likely to see other people as reliable and trustworthy. While rule utilitarians do not deny that there are people who are not trustworthy, they can claim that their moral code generally condemns violations of trust as wrongful acts. The problem with act utilitarians is that they support a moral view that has the effect of undermining trust and that sacrifices the good effects of a moral code that supports and encourages trustworthiness.
Rule utilitarians believe that their view is also immune to the criticism that act utilitarianism is too demanding. In addition, while the act utilitarian commitment to impartiality undermines the moral relevance of personal relations, rule utilitarians claim that their view is not open to this criticism. They claim that rule utilitarianism allows for partiality toward ourselves and others with whom we share personal relationships.
Moreover, they say, rule utilitarianism can recognize justifiable partiality to some people without rejecting the commitment to impartiality that is central to the utilitarian tradition. How can rule utilitarianism do this? In his defense of rule utilitarianism, Brad Hooker distinguishes two different contexts in which partiality and impartiality play a role. One involves the justification of moral rules and the other concerns the application of moral rules.
Justifications of moral rules, he claims, must be strictly impartial. When we ask whether a rule should be adopted, it is essential to consider the impact of the rule on all people and to weigh the interests of everyone equally. The second context concerns the content of the rules and how they are applied in actual cases. Rule utilitarians argue that a rule utilitarian moral code will allow partiality to play a role in determining what morality requires, forbids, or allows us to do.
As an example, consider a moral rule parents have a special duty to care for their own children. See Parental Rights and Obligations. This is a partialist rule because it not only allows but actually requires parents to devote more time, energy, and other resources to their own children than to others. While the content of this rule is not impartial, rule utilitarians believe it can be impartially justified. Partiality toward children can be justified for several reasons.
Caring for children is a demanding activity. Children need the special attention of adults to develop physically, emotionally, and cognitively. It is not possible for absentee parents or strangers to provide individual children with all that they need.
Therefore, we can maximize the overall well-being of children as a class by designating certain people as the caretakers for specific children.
For these reasons, partiality toward specific children can be impartially justified. Teachers, for example have special duties to students in their own classes and have no duty to educate all students.
Similarly, public officials can and should be partial to people in the jurisdiction in which they work. If the overall aim is to maximize the well-being of all people in all cities, for example, then we are likely to get better results by having individuals who know and understand particular cities focus on them while other people focus on other cities. Based on examples like these, rule utilitarians claim that their view, unlike act utilitarianism, avoids the problems raised about demandingness and partiality.
Being committed to impartialist justifications of moral rules does not commit them to rejecting moral rules that allow or require people to give specific others priority. While rule utilitarians can defend partiality, their commitment to maximizing overall utility also allows them to justify limits on the degree of partiality that is morally permissible. It would be wrong, for example, for a parent to injure children who are running in a school race in order to increase the chances that their own children will win.
The key point is that while rule utilitarianism permits partiality toward some people, it can also generate rules that limit the ways in which people may act partially and it might even support a positive duty for well off people to provide assistance to strangers when the needs and interests of people to whom we are partial are fully met, when they have surplus resources that could be used to assist strangers in dire conditions, and when there are ways to channel these resources effectively to people in dire need.
Act utilitarians criticize rule utilitarians for irrationally supporting rule-based actions in cases where more good could be done by violating the rule than obeying it.
Act utilitarians say that they recognize that rules can have value. For example, rules can provide a basis for acting when there is no time to deliberate. In addition, rules can define a default position, a justification for doing or refraining from a type of action as long as there is no reason for not doing it. But when people know that more good can be done by violating the rule then the default position should be over-ridden. In their view, whatever defects act utilitarianism may have, rule utilitarianism will have the same defects.
According to this criticism, although rule utilitarianism looks different from act utilitarianism, a careful examination shows that it collapses into or, as David Lyons claimed, is extensionally equivalent to act utilitarianism. To understand this criticism, it is worth focusing on a distinction between rule utilitarianism and other non-utilitarian theories.
Many people see this view as too rigid and claim that it fails to take into account the circumstances in which a lie is being told. Suppose that a rule utilitarian adopts this approach and advocates a moral code that consists of a list of rules of this form.
If rule utilitarianism is to be distinct from act utilitarianism, its supporters must find a way to formulate rules that allow exceptions to a general requirement or prohibition while not collapsing into act utilitarianism.
One way to do this is to identify specific conditions under which violating a general moral requirement would be justified. In cases of lesser harms or deceitful acts that will benefit the liar, lying would still be prohibited, even if lying might maximize overall utility.
It also suggests, however, that rule utilitarians face difficult challenges in formulating utility-based rules that have a reasonable degree of flexibility built into them but are not so flexible that they collapse into act utilitarianism. In addition, although the rules that make up a moral code should be flexible enough to account for the complexities of life, they cannot be so complex that they are too difficult for people to learn and understand.
Although rule utilitarians try to avoid the weaknesses attributed to act utilitarianism, critics argue that they cannot avoid these weaknesses because they do not take seriously many of our central moral concepts. As a result, they cannot support the right answers to crucial moral problems. An important cultural difference emerges over the notion of claim-rights, which seems so central to most western conceptions of human rights. Some analysts have argued that this conception does not suit duty-based moral systems.
Islam and Christianity are two of many religions whose morality is based upon duties imposed on the believers, without reference to the rights of others to be treated morally. The duty to treat others properly is owed to God and, it is argued, one cannot make a claim against the duty another owes to God.
Islamic rulers are subject to dictates in the Koran about the treatment of their subjects, but these duties do not create any rights for the governed. In traditional Confucian philosophy, there are also duties placed on the rulers without rights being created. Another challenge to conceiving benefits as claim rights has come from Marxist theorists, some of whom have held that rights are a bourgeois creation needed as protection against the exploitative nature of the capitalist state, that should have no place in communist society.
In this view, rights are not simply claims by one person against another's duty. The claimant also possesses a duty with respect to the benefit claimed; for example, one has not only a right to work, but a duty to do so as well. To pit an individual against the state in a rights claim is to divorce that citizen from their own duty, and - more importantly - to validate the individuals' antagonistic assertion that they have a better idea of their needs than the community leaders who are leading them towards a classless society.
Depending on one's notion of the importance of a vanguard of the proletariat or of the value of any individual worker's judgment, one can either reconcile or deny that an individual's rights claim is compatible with Marxism or not. The notion that human rights are needed to protect individuals from their society is not a concern felt in some cultures. A central challenge to human rights emerges from the perceived relationship of individuals to their society.
Critics have argued that human rights are based on the liberal view that individuals remain distinct and severable from their society; indeed, the autonomy of the individual is one of the distinguishing characteristics of liberalism. But a number of other perspectives regard individuals as inseparable elements of their collective community. For example, traditional African cultures have been portrayed as placing more importance on the community than individuals, whose value stems from their contribution to the community as a whole.
Classical conservatism, for example, stressed the manner in which individuals belong to an hierarchical, organic society in which each individual assumes importance in the way in which they can contribute to the collective society's welfare. The greater needs of the whole society may require a stratified society with quite different roles, duties, and benefits that would seem incompatible without many ideas of liberal equality; the conservative notion of equality may stress equality in the value of individuals rather than any equality of opportunity let alone condition.
An objection common to all these positions lies in the significance other perspectives place on the relationships of individuals to their society. Human rights have a completely different focus, with their emphasis on the benefits which individuals are entitled to claim against their community. But many cultures, religions, and political philosophies are not immediately embracing or even compatible with such importance being attached to the primacy of the benefits to be accorded by human rights to any one ordinary individual within their society.
Even if one can move beyond these fundamental disputes, cultural relativism persists as a thorny obstacle when it comes to deciding what particular benefits should be protected within the human rights rubric. For example, some of the most persistent problems that human rights advocates see is the lack of equality in societies around the world.
Unfortunately, there are profoundly different ways in which "equality" may be conceptualized. Even with an agreement upon a particular form of equality, there still remains a failure of many cultures to accept liberalism's insistence that equality is essential.
Indeed, many beliefs centre on individuals occupying different stations in life and that involve particular responsibilities and privileges. Confucianism involves a hierarchically structured society. Islam distinguishes between believers and two classifications of non-believers.
Hinduism has held that people are born to different castes because of their spiritual progress in their past lives. And, the Roman Catholic church and some Protestant churches insist on male supremacy within their institutions and liturgy. There are many across the world who will ardently resist any imposition of full equality in all aspects of their society. With this in mind, there will be profound disagreements about whether there is a right to equality inherent in either human existence or dignity.
There may be even more grounds for disagreement over which particular conceptualization of equality to pursue - equality of condition, situation, or opportunity and so on. Even where there is agreement on a principle that should be embodied in a right, there can be widely differing views of the substantive benefits that must be provided in order to respect the principle. For instance, if there is a right to education, does this right involve compulsory, free education?
If so, up to what level? And, who has control over what subjects are taught and by whom? Are adults entitled to continue an interrupted education whenever they want, and at whose expense? Since a number of religious groups believe that education should take place within a completely spiritual framework, must the state allow, or even fund, separate school systems?
These questions will be answered quite differently depending on whether the society is, for example, industrialized or agrarian, Shiite or largely atheistic, harmoniously plural or rigidly homogeneous. Thus, cultural relativism challenges human rights in their conception as well as their operation.
If human rights are to pose some global standard, then there must be some response to relativism. Jack Donnelly has drawn up a typology of a spectrum of relativism that usefully shows the range of the challenge to universal moral precepts such as human rights. Human rights are seen to be just western liberal mores that some seek to impose on other cultures. Pollis and Schwab have argued this point to declare that human rights cannot have universal legitimacy.
Rhoda Howard argues that this perspective romanticizes the value of various cultures in a way that permits terrible abuses: "Cultural absolutism forgives cruelty on the grounds that acting in accordance with the customs of one's own group is a universal moral principle". At the other end of the spectrum, radical universalism asserts that there are indeed universal moral rules that cannot be legitimately overridden by the cultural values of particular societies.
From this perspective, human rights would be global standards from which no society could depart; all cultures would have to protect and provide the same benefits that human rights safeguard. Unfortunately, some human rights advocates stray, sometimes inadvertently, into this position; as Donnelly and Howard once wrote:.
Internationally recognized human rights require a liberal regime. Other types of regimes, and the conceptions of human dignity on which they rest, may be defensible on other moral and political grounds, but they will not stand up to scrutiny under the standards of human rights. While Donnelly and Howard may not wish to be characterized as universalists, this quotation illustrates a serious problem with global human rights standards. So much of the values enshrined in contemporary human rights documents are liberal in origin that they require a liberal regime to be realized fully.
As some critics charge, human rights really may be an attempt to universalize liberalism as the ultimate standard to which all societies should conform. It is one thing to argue that liberalism is a preferred form of society, but it quite another to argue, even implicitly, by appeals to human rights that every human is inherently entitled to the benefits of a liberal society simply by being human. Many commentators would probably prefer the middle ground between radical cultural relativism and universalism, but even this range has its problems.
Donnelly identifies two intermediate categories, strong cultural relativism and weak cultural relativism. In the former, each society's culture provides the principal basis for its moral standards, while in the latter each culture is just an important source of its morals.
In strong cultural relativism, each culture forms the base of its mores and human rights would be "a check on potential excesses of relativism". While there are good arguments to reject both radical cultural relativism and universalism, it is rather difficult to construct a watertight argument that either strong or weak cultural relativism must be rejected in favour of the other.
Donnelly tries to settle the issue by framing the discussion around the nature of the effect that culture would have. He says that cultural values could shape the substance, interpretation, and form of human rights.
But Donnelly concludes that universal human rights should vary only in the form in which each culture would deliver the benefits at issue. Unfortunately, this resolution depends on one's acceptance of the premise that there should be universal human rights in the first place, and that the benefits should be roughly similar across the world.
Some human rights advocates, such as Donnelly, simply dismiss the strongest challenges of cultural relativism - to the existence of human rights in general or of particular rights - as being irrelevant; they argue that human rights evidently do exist and certain benefits must be provided to everyone. A number of other writers have approached the challenge of cultural relativism from another perspective, by searching for common ground among the world's cultures.
Alison Renteln has also asserted that human rights can be accommodated within a variety of cultures if a wider view is taken of the nature of human rights. If one can find moral goods or benefits that are common, then these may form the basis for universal human rights. But there is a logical flaw in this approach, since a survey of moral practices is just as likely to turn up many values upheld in societies that would horrify human rights activists - infanticide, banishment, and capital punishment are but three examples.
Rhoda Howard has validly noted that there have been so many cultures that have inflicted cruelty on their members or strangers that human rights cannot be simply established by saying that every culture has respected the essence of human rights in their own way. While there are many examples of matriarchal societies, they are few in comparison to patriarchies. If so many societies over the millennia have believed that men should rule and women follow, what view of equality would we be led to adopt from the anthropological evidence?
I doubt it would be one that would bring comfort to most liberal human rights activists. There is a more revealing side to this debate, in the weight to be given to cultural commonalities. If one were to search for common moral values that could ground human rights, it is doubtful that absolutely universal practices or values would emerge.
The most one is likely to say is that the overwhelming majority of societies have held such-and-such a view. If a universal moral value is to built upon a preponderant, rather than universal, support, then moral rules risk simply becoming the domain of the majority to which minority cultural practices must conform. But if such a moral majoritarianism is to be admitted, then patriarchy must be adopted as the determinant ingredient of gender equality because of the shear weight of its practice.
Moreover, the end of such a debate over moral commonalities is more likely to lead to a list of shared moral goods or benefits that are valued in societies, rather than a complete rights paradigm. For example, traditional Christian and Islamic societies share many notions of benefits that individuals should be given, but they founded such benefits upon God-given duties and not upon the inherent entitlements of the person who would enjoy the benefit.
The claim-rights conception of human rights would be difficult to ground in common moral or cultural practice. In large measure, attempts to reconcile contemporary human rights with different value systems may depend on accepting that the benefits involved need not necessarily be protected only as claim-rights; duty based moralities can provide similar substantive enjoyment of benefits as a rights-based approach.
However, it is sometimes necessary to admit that certain benefits would not fit within a particular culture's list of human rights benefits; equality and freedom of religion can be especially problematic to reconcile in the same way in different societies. Human rights face significant hurdles when one tries to apply them universally across cultural, religious and political divides.
The full force of the problem emerges clearly when a particular cultural or religious group is said to flagrantly infringe a right embodied in widely-supported human rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The members of that culture claim that their practice is a revered moral value within their society and that the outside world has no moral authority to require a change to conform to the external norms.
The problem is especially compounded when the infringement involves some issue that defines that culture or religion. For example, one of the most egregious sins for a Muslim is to renounce Islam and take up another religion; many Christians would also say that a Christian risks eternal damnation by turning his or her back on Christ.
And yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically states in Article 18 that the right to freedom of religion includes the freedom to change one's religion or belief. So, does any religious community infringe human rights if it punishes or condemns apostasy? Those who believe there is only one, true religion cannot be easily persuaded that an adherent has the right to renounce that religion and adopt another faith; the apostate may lead others to renounce their one path to salvation.
An yet, the UNDHR would suggest that as a matter of human dignity, every individual has the human right to change religions. As such they ought to be encouraged in their change of beliefs as an exercise of their fundamental rights - not condemned, punished, or prevented from converting others. A fundamental dilemma for both universalists and cultural relativists lies in the tension between external and internal morality.
On the dimension of interaction between different cultural groups, the relativist would argue that the external morality is of no concern to the members of any particular group; only the internal morality of that group is legitimate. The universalist would have to argue that internal morality of any one group is subordinate to the external morality of the whole collection of groups. In the human rights context, this means that a relativist would argue that international human rights codes cannot be imposed upon any particular society, since only that society's own moral value system has legitimate authority there.
In contrast, the advocates of universal human rights would say that the practices of any particular society must be changed to conform to the moral standards of international human rights. However, the interplay between internal and external morality can change dramatically when one moves the analysis from the dimension of global society versus an individual society to the dimension of any particular society versus an individual in that society.
Whereas relativists have to uphold the primacy of internal morality in the global v. If relativists argue that only each society may legitimately establish the moral rules for that society, then they cannot object to the legitimacy of a groups' cultural rule that demands conformity from the members of that society - such as a prohibition against apostasy on pain of death.
On the other hand, universalists must champion the cause of external morality at the global level, but the nature of human rights means that they must allow the primacy of internal morality in many instances where an individual's internal morality clashes with the mores of her or his society. With all these challenges to the existence and application of human rights, it is little wonder that human rights still remain controversial. Perhaps, the real wonder is that human rights are not more contentious.
In many ways, popular political debate simply assumes that human rights exist and they protect all the benefits described in the various international and domestic documents.
However, this assumption is one which ignores fundamental problems that must be addressed. The moral force often attributed to human rights cannot simply be asserted without resolving questions about the genesis of human rights, who may hold them, and what particular benefits are protected. Here it must be conceded that life and death are not always dichotomous, since humans may exist in comatose or paralytic conditions that may appear to be neither properly life nor death. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan , C.
MacPherson ed. Rousseau, op. A good rebuttal of the slavery issue is found in R. Hare, "What is Wrong with Slavery? The importance of distinguishing the variety of utilitarianism before examining its compatibility with moral rights is evident in a paper by David Lyons: "Utility and Rights", in Jeremy Waldron ed. Miller Jr. Richard B. Nelson and Vera M. Green eds. Donnelly, Universal Human rights in theory and Practice , pp.
Rhoda E. Most companies have a formal or informal code of ethics , which is shaped by their corporate culture, values, and regional laws. Today, having a formalized code of business ethics is more important than ever. For a business to grow, it not only needs to increase its bottom line , but it also must create a reputation for being socially responsible. Companies also must endeavor to keep their promises and put ethics at least on par with profits.
Consumers are looking for companies that they can trust, and employees work better when there is a solid model of ethics in place. On an individual level, if you make morally correct decisions at work, then everyone's happiness will increase. However, if you choose to do something morally wrong—even if legal—then your happiness and that of your colleagues, will decrease. In the workplace, though, utilitarian ethics are difficult to achieve.
These ethics also can be challenging to maintain in our business culture, where a capitalistic economy often teaches people to focus on themselves at the expense of others.
Similarly, monopolistic competition teaches one business to flourish at the expense of others. So, although utilitarianism is surely a reason-based approach to determining right and wrong, it has obvious limitations.
Utilitarianism puts forward that it is a virtue to improve one's life better by increasing the good things in the world and minimizing the bad things. This means striving for pleasure and happiness while avoiding discomfort or unhappiness.
A utilitarian is a person who holds the beliefs of utilitarianism. Today, these people might be described as cold and calculating, practical, and perhaps selfish—since they may seek their own pleasure at the expense of the social good at times. Rule utilitarians focus on the effects of actions that stem from certain rules or moral guidelines e.
If an action conforms to a moral rule then the act is moral. A rule is deemed moral if its existence increases the greater good than any other rule, or the absence of such a rule. If a consumer buys something only for its practical use-value, in a calculative and rational evaluation, then it is of utilitarian value.
This precludes any sort of emotional or sentimental valuing, psychological biases, or other considerations. Because its ideology argues for the greatest good for the greatest number, a business acting in a utilitarian fashion should increase the welfare of others. However, in practice, utilitarianism can lead to greed and dog-eat-dog competition that can undermine the social good.
Bentham, J. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , ed. Mill, J. Utilitarianism Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government , Wealth Management.
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