Tuesday 3/5

Deontology I

Assignments

• Case Analysis I Assigned

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

• Kantian Ethical Theory
• A Kantian Deduction

Cases

• Human Experimentation Cases
• More 'Bad Blood'

Synopsis

Today we motivated an important alternative to utilitarianism by considering the sordid history of human experimentation.

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. Throw 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.

In light of these (and many other) real-world examples, we must ask, is there an alternative to utilitarianism which lacks these morally problematic implications? Next time we take up this alternative.