Here’s another way to consider our dilemma from today’s class: Bentham and Mill (utilitarian consequentialists) think there’s a straightforward moral answer to what to do about the person who is about to murder ten people – take him out, if the probability is sufficiently high that this will minimize aggregate harm, short and long term. (Some Rule Utilitarians might balk, but probably not for long).
Kant and other deontologists don’t think there is any genuinely moral answer, since all options involve treating persons as means to an end only, a direct violation of the Categorical Imperative. So he might tell us to do what we think we have to do, and take full responsibility for our choice, but not to look to morality to tell us it’s okay.
Aristotle is likely to take a rather different approach. Rather than fixating on the choice of the moment (for which he might even somewhat grudgingly accept a sort of utilitarian calculation) he might ask us to examine what is wrong with our society such that scenarios like this keep cropping up – clearly our habits and our polis have a big problem if matters come to such a turn very often. In this regard, President Obama’s response to the recent spate of mass killings has a slight Aristotelian flavor – without minimizing individual responsibility, he persists in asking why it is easier in our society to obtain high-power weapons than mental health care. It’s not an entirely unreasonable question.
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2 comments:
I think the question you end with is an important one. If Aristotle would in fact ask that about our modern circumstance, what might have been a historically equivalent question he would ask in his time?
I am curious because I am not sure that I understand what evidence from our reading portraits Aristotle to have such a holistic view.
Think about Aristotle's repeated comments in Book I about the importance of upbringing, of friends of good character whose behavior you can imitate to learn virtue, of the moral architecture -- the well-ordered polis -- without which people cannot hope to become excellent. It seems to me but a small stretch to reverse the equation: if people routinely behave badly, we should inquire not only about their choices and upbringing, but about the larger structures that shape them.
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