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Haiti and the Problem of Evil - TT Response to Pete on Kant

(Text as at 03/07/2010 17:34:05)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

From: Theo
To: Pete, Sylvia
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 2:43 AM
Subject: Re: Haiti and the problem of evil (Kant)

I'm not a great fan of Kant¹ either, but isn't he completely antithetical to the Utilitarians? He has unconditional imperatives, while for a Utilitarian, anything goes if the sums work out right. I'm a consequentialist myself, holding that actions are good or bad according to whether their likely consequences are good or bad. The trouble with deontology, it seems to me, comes when you press it - just why is X good or bad? Just because it IS (said in a LOUD VOICE). Why is going round shooting people at random bad? Not because God has placed an arbitrary ban on random shootings (as though he might have allowed them) but because random shootings have bad consequences. Dying is painful and horrid, and deprives the deceased and his friends/family/dependents/etc of good things. It's bad (in normal circumstances) for you, and society generally, if you or others are shot. The badness has nothing really to do with the badness of the shooter - the bad effect this evil act has on his poor soul. No doubt he doesn't feature highly in the virtue-ethics stakes, but that's not the core issue - which isn't him and his rotten self, but the consequences his rotten actions have. Presumably, though, some selves become so rotten that they habitually cause mayhem (when they have the power) on a massive scale. Then their rottenness is of consequentialist concern in its own right. But if confined somewhere out of harm's way, they can be as rotten as they like.

I'm obviously supportive of Kant's view that we shouldn't use others as means to ends that aren't their own. But why? Surely it's not a principle plucked out of the air, but something that - if violated - in general has bad consequences.

I suppose consequentialism is open to counter-examples - situations (usually imaginary) where a consequentialist (as a moral human being) would want to say that something was bad even though the principles he espouses don't allow him to say that. Usually, the response on the part of the consequentialist is that the consequences of an act are wider than might at first be thought, and some nasty act that in isolation might seem to have good consequences overall, in fact has bad ones when you think of precedent and such like. But you may be able to dream up scenarios (eg. involving secrecy) where there are no wider consequences at all. Eg. the scenario where there's one healthy person whose bits are cannibalised to cure ten unrelated sick people, so instead of ten dead people and one live one, we have ten live ones and one dead one.

The usual answer to this counter-example would be that the general deleterious effect on the good of society if anyone could be legally snatched and cannibalised would exceed whatever one-off gain there might be. But say it was done secretly, so there were no insidious consequences? I'm attracted by a form of rule utilitarianism, whereby general principles are chosen because of their generally beneficent results, and these principles are in general binding. But I claim that they can (and must) be overridden if the stakes are high enough. If boiling that baby really is the only way to save the whole of humanity from a similar extermination by those ruthless aliens, then the terrible act is not just permissible, but an urgent duty, sad to say. However, the stakes aren't high enough in the cannibalisation case, though there are certain circumstances where it might be rational - you know, where the crew eat the cabin boy when cast adrift. But only as a last resort, mind you.

What does this have to do with Haiti? Well, not a lot Scripturally, I don't think. True, God is said to raise up certain people to do wicked things, but those people seem to have thought that they were acting autonomously (as we all do, whether we actually are or not). But the notion that God might be using lots of unfortunates' predicaments to improve the souls of those who are in a position to rescue them would seem to abuse everyone concerned if God was in a position to call the whole show off. It fails the Kantian test - the victims aren't willing participants, and the helpers are themselves duped, in that they think they are acting purely to help others, when the show is put on for their own benefit. It also fails the Consequentialist test too - how could the good accruing to the altruists' souls outweigh the bad done to the victims they don't quite manage to rescue? Though, if you have a divine rewarder dispensing eternal goodies on a whim, then the sums might work out any which way you like: but if that was the way things were, then our intuitions of right and wrong, and good and bad, would need to be re-tuned. Presumably, that was the delusion the more warm-hearted Spanish Inquisitors were suffering under. If you really could save someone from eternal frazzling by giving them a brief frazzling now, then it would be a loving act to do so. You just have to be a bit more sure of your facts than they were.

No doubt you'll put right any errors in the above in the next round, you being a certified Christian Ethicist and all that.