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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
Neither do I. The question is whether their actions are justifiable or even 'right' based on utilitarian logic.
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I don't think that's the question. Clearly, any action which results in net positive amount of happiness is a morally good action according to utilitarianism. It already answers your question. The question for you should be whether or not you agree with that, if you could ever think killing for pleasure is morally right. And if there are scenarios where utilitarianism would allow for it to be, whether or not that completely invalidates utilitarianism in other situations, like abortion.
For me, it doesn't. I don't require utilitarianism to be flawless like you seem to do. I can apply it when it makes sense to do so and not when it doesn't. For example utilitarianism would have me break laws for good consquences, but when it comes to laws, I think a normative approach is better. I generally think that we should follow the laws in our society, even if happiness could be maximized by breaking them.
So whether or not it is possible to dream up a scenario where utilitarianism defends what you perceive as the wrong action is, to me, not really interesting. Your requirement for a morale theory to be flawless in regards to your own moral interests is, in my opinion, unrealistic. If you submit different moral theories to extreme testing, like you have with utilitarianism, none of them will satisfy you in every instance. Utilitarianism is not unique in that way.
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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
Our fitness is dependent on certain people. We also compete with other people. It isn't as simple as saying we care about all humans because it makes good evolutionary sense. That isn't always the case.
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The reason I didn't mention competition is because abortion is not a matter of competition. But sure, we have an us and them sort of thinking. Most of the people you meet in your society, you'd probably include under the "us" umbrella.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
The utilitarian model also wouldn't save us from this, assuming suffering is the metric being used. The dog's suffering is undeniably greater than the human's suffering in this case.
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Yes, utilitarianism will often protect animals over humans because it doesn't say that human suffering is more important than animal suffering. But what does that have to do with abortions?
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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
I don't think that all gut feeling morality is purely instinctual. You're right to say culture has probably played its role here. I would argue it has also played its role in convincing us to value fidelity. The jealousy you feel over your partner cheating is no more 'natural' than the urge to protect an innocent human fetus.
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I disagree and think that jealousy is completely natural. We all have an unconscious desire for sex, that is to pass our genes on to the next generation because our nature doesn't know about prevention like condoms. But in order to effectively pass on your genes, you also have to be careful with your resources and not squander them, because you have to survive and preferably help your children do so as well. (As a side note, other people are potential resources to us if they will cooperate.)
But, let's say you are a man and you have a female partner. That partner goes and has sex with someone else and becomes pregnant. If you have no jealousy, you would be less likely to find out and you would raise the child like your own. From an evolutionary point of view, you would have been the victim of an exploitation strategy from the other male who impregnated your woman. After all, you spent your resources rearing his child, his genes. He is the one getting rewarded while you've been penalized, I guess you could say. Jealousy is a defense against being exploited in that way and, as a result, some level of natural jealousy seems a reasonable expectation for humans to have.
So to summarize, nature is full of defense behaviours and emotions that have evolved as a response to such exploitation. Jealousy is one of them.
You're both a great example of how to have a debate with wildly differing views without descending into name-calling or sulkiness or the other stuff that sometimes happens in these cases. You should both be proud of yourselves, I mean that.
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