Re: OT - Santorum Criticism of Bush

Johannes Roehl wrote:
> John Harrington schrieb:
> > Matthew Silverstein wrote:
> >
> >>On Saturday, November 19, 2005, John Harrington wrote:
> >>
> >>>As I explained in the part you snipped, marital infidelity is
> >>>categorically immoral precisely because it does cause harm to couples.
> >>>If I haven't experienced harm, no harm has come to me. I can drive 110
> >>>miles down the freeway with my kids in the back and it is very likely no
> >>>harm will come to them. That doesn't make doing so okay. You are
> >>>conflating categories (beings that cannot experience harm) and accidents
> >>>(beings that happen not to experience harm).
> >>
> >>But at best this distinction you've set up would allow you to say that
> >>marital infidelity is, in general, wrong or immoral. But it seems you are
> >>still commited to saying that, in the hypothetical case I described, your
> >>wife did not do anything unethical or immoral, even though such actions
> >>usually or almost always are unethical.
> >>
> >>Why, in other words, would marital infidelity be "categorically" or always
> >>immoral if it only causes harm *most of the time*?
> >
> > The questions you ask are answered by my above-quoted paragraph.
> > Risking harm to others is immoral. If you want to hypothesize a
> > situation in which a wife cheats on a husband and she is 100% certain
> > (and correct) no harm will come to him (or anyone), then that is not
> > immoral. But I wouldn't class that as garden variety marital
> > infidelity. We'd have to come up with a new term. Perhaps "magical
> > infidelity". There's a difference between a being that cannot feel
> > harm and a being that *may* not feel harm.
> >
> > Why is this all so difficult for you? It's really quite simple (not
> > simplistic or simple-minded, but straighforward and elegant).
>
> Apparently many people think that a single ethical principle of harm
> avoidance is a little too straightforward. For good reason, IMO. Apart
> from the cases mentioned already, consider the following case: It's
> allowed to harm a human being if greater harm is possibly or probably
> avoided, e.g. painful surgical treatment to avoid long suffering and/or
> premature death. But "possibly" and "probably" are obviously vague and
> often a surgeon has to take risks. If a simple purely consequentialist
> ethics were right a risky and successful surgical operation would be
> morally good (although harm is done), but if the treatment turned out to
> be unsuccessful (although the surgeon did his best), the very same
> action would suddenly turn out to be immoral, which seems extremely
> counterintuitive.

Your conclusion is counterintuitive by the "harm" ethical standard I
outlined. If we punished (even by mere opprobrium) physicians because
a percentage of their heart bypass operations (say) resulted in
infection which took the life of the patient, no or fewer heart bypass
operations would be performed, and that would result in more harm, not
less. Also, an ethical physician explains the risk to the patient, and
the patient authorizes the operation. So, in a sense, the patient is
operating on himself. The physician is the mere agent of his will.
You can't look at the operation as involving only the patient and the
physician. If the world consisted only of one patient and one
physician, you might be right, from a consequentialist pov, but once
you expand the scope to include populations and probabilities, then it
becomes clear why even risky potentially life-saving operations in the
long run result in more good than harm.

> (There would be many such cases of "moral luck" where
> an outcome of a risky action, for which the agent would be responsible
> only in a very weak sense, would condemn his action as either morally
> right or wrong in retrospect.)
> The consequentialist needs rather elaborate constructions to deal with
> cases like the ones mentioned (never discovered infidelity, not keeping
> a promise given to a now dead person etc.), often implictly employing
> additional principles that considerably mar the simplicity.

Nonsense. The "constructions" are very simple.


J

.

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