Diskussionen om deontologi, dvs. helgandet av principer, vs. utilitarism, dvs. konsekvens-moral, är lite snärjig ibland. Detta beror bl.a. på att utilitarism kan sägas vara en princip som en deontolog helgar, och att deontologi kan vara en metod utilitarismen lutar sig mot givet inkomplett information om världen och dess kausala samband.
The Non-Libertarian FAQ klarar ut det här på ett mycket bra sätt genom att jämföra the gold standard och the clinical standard. Låt mig citera (btw. är utilitarism samma sak som consequentialism):
"12.4.5: Okay, okay, I understand that if people did what actually had good consequences it would have good consequences, but I worry that if people do what they think has good consequences, it will lead to violence and dictatorship and dystopia and all those other things you mentioned above.
Yes, I agree this is an important distinction. There are two uses for a moral system. The first is to define what morality is. The second is to give people a useful tool for choosing what to do in moral dilemmas. I am arguing that consequentialism does the first. I don't think it does the second right out of the box.
To try a metaphor, doctors sometimes have two ways of defining disease; the gold standard and the clinical standard. The gold standard is the "perfect" test for the disease; for example, in Alzheimers disease, it's to autopsy the brain after the person has died and see if it has certain features under the microscope. Obviously you can't autopsy a person who's still alive, so when doctors are actually trying to diagnose Alzheimers they use a more practical method, like how well the person does on a memory test.
Right now I'm arguing that consequentialism is the gold standard for morality: it's the purest, most sophisticated explanation of what morality actually is. At the same time, it might be a terrible idea to make your everyday decisions based on it, just as it's a terrible idea to diagnose Alzheimers with an autopsy in someone who's still alive.
However, once we know that consequentialism is the gold standard for morality, we can start designing our clinical standards by trying to figure out which "clinical standard" for morality will produce the best consequences.
[...]
13. Rights and Heuristics
13.1: Is there a moral justification for rights, like the right to free speech or the right to property?
Yes. Rights are the "clinical standard" for morality, the one we use to make our everyday decisions after we acknowledge that pure consequentialism might not lead to the best consequences when used by fallible humans.
In this conception, rights are conclusions rather than premises. They are heuristics (heuristic = a rule-of-thumb that usually but not always works) for remembering what sorts of things usually have good or bad consequences, a distillation of moral wisdom that is often more trustworthy than morally fallible humans.
For example, trying to tell people what religions they can or can't follow almost always has bad consequences. At best, people are miserable because they're being forced to follow a faith they don't believe in. At worst, they resist and then you get Inquisitions and Holy Wars and everyone ends up dead. Restriction of religion causing bad consequences is sufficiently predictable that we generalize it into a hard and fast rule, and call that rule something like the "right to freedom of religion".
Other things like banning criticism of the government, trying to prevent people from owning guns, and seizing people's property willy-nilly also work like this, so we call those "rights" too.
13.2: So if you think that violating rights will have good consequences, then it's totally okay, right?
It's not quite so simple. Rights are not just codifications of the insight that certain actions lead to bad consequences, they're codifications of the insight that certain actions lead to bad consequences in ways that people consistently fail to predict or appreciate.
All throughout history, various despots and princes have thought "You know, the last hundred times someone tried to restrict freedom of religion, it went badly. Luckily, my religion happens to be the One True Religion, and I'm totally sure of this, and everyone else will eventually realize this and fall in line, so my plan to restrict freedom of religion will work great!"
Every revolution starts with an optimist who says "All previous attempts to kill a bunch of people and seize control of the state have failed to produce a utopia, but luckily my plan is much better and we're totally going to get to utopia this time." Or, as Huxley put it: "Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists and there we are - there we are - in the Golden Future."
So another way to put it is that rights don't just say "Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences", but also "Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences, even when smart people are quite certain it will have good consequences.""
Rättigheter, dvs. deontologi, kan alltså vara ett ypperligt verktyg för att bedöma var som ger bäst konsekvenser. Rättigheter står således inte i kontrast till nyttomaximering.
Däremot, som The Non-Libertarian FAQ också tar upp, är det skillnad på principer och principer. Exemplet är att juden som konverterar kanske kan börja göra upp eld på fredagar, vilket tidigare varit mot henoms principer. Däremot står sig säkert budet att icke mörda, även när judaisten blivit ateist. Ett annat exempel är den kristne som slutar tro på gud, men håller kvar vid budet att inte stjäla, men kanske slappnar av lite på hela hata-bögar-grejen.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar