SS+Utilitarianism+good+FL


 * 1) **A risk of nuclear war precludes any deontological framework – uncertainty mandates that every policy decision must be able to guarantee the continued existence of the human race, and to ignore this possibility is in itself immoral and unjustified.**
 * This card has been gender-modified.**
 * Schell, policy analyst and proliferation expert, 2000** (Jonathan, “The Fate of the Earth”, p. 94-5)

To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation—just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without breaking down catastrophically. These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm our fear and reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time we are compelled to admit that there may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global effects, including effects of which we are as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and are forced to make our decisions in a state of uncertainty. If we wish to act to save our species, we have to muster our resolve in spite of our awareness that the life of the species may not now in fact be jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore the peril, we have to admit that we do so in the knowledge that the species may be in danger of imminent self-destruction. When the existence of nuclear weapons was made known, thoughtful people everywhere in the world realized that if the great powers entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner or later face the possibility of extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international agreements preventing it an arms race would probably occur. They knew that the path of nuclear armament was a dead end for mankind. The discovery of the energy in mass—of “the basic power of the universe”—and of a means by which man could release that energy altered the relationship between [humans] and the source of [their] life, the earth. In the shadow of this power, the earth became small and the life of the human species doubtful. In that sense, the question of human extinction has been on the political agenda of the world ever since the first nuclear weapon was detonated, and there was no need for the world to build up its present tremendous arsenals before starting to worry about it. At just what point the species crossed, or will have crossed, the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to destroy itself and actually having the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any second, is not precisely knowable. But it is clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the zone of risk of extinction. But **the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account.** Up to now, **every risk has been contained within the frame of life; extinction would shatter the frame.** It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes would be drowned for all time. **We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of human history.** To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and **a fraction of infinity is still infinity.** In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand before a mystery, and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without delay to withdraw the threat we now pose to the earth and to ourselves.

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Nye, prof. of IR at Harvard University, 1986 (Joseph, “Nuclear Ethics”, p. 24)
 * 1) **Only utilitarianism takes into account the inevitability of sacrifices and compromise – any other framework is utopian and inevitably fails.**

Whether one accepts the broad consequentialist approach or chooses some other, more eclectic way to include and reconcile the three dimensions of complex moral issues, there will often be a sense of uneasiness about the answers, not just because of the complexity of the problems “but simply that there is no satisfactory solution to these issues – at least none that appears to avoid in practice what most men would still regard as an intolerable sacrifice of value.” When value is sacrificed, there is often the problem of “dirty hands.” Not all ethical decisions are pure ones. The absolutist may avoid the problem of dirty hands, but often at the cost of having no hands at all. Moral theory cannot be “rounded off and made complete and tidy.” That is part of the modern human condition. But that does not exempt us from making difficult moral choices.


 * 1) **Policymakers specifically must act through utilitarianism because they can only make decisions based on the good of the public.**
 * Goodin, fellow in philosophy at** **Australian** **National** **Defense** **University****, 1990** (Robert, “The Utilitarian Response”, p. 141-2)

My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

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 * 1) **Double bind – either no human lives are equally valuable, which forces them to prove why the lives they save are worth it, or all human life is equally valuable, which necessitates utilitarianism.**
 * Harsanyi, prof. of economics at UC Berkeley, 1982** (John, “Utilitarianism and Beyond”, p. 26-7)

Some further notes on this suggestion will be in place here. First, __it is sometimes alleged that justice has to be at odds with utility. But if we ask how we are to be just between the competing interests of different people, it seems hard to give any other answer than it is by giving equal weight, impartially to the interests of everybody. And this is precisely what yields the utility principle. It does not necessarily yield equality in the resulting distribution. There are certainly very good utilitarian reasons for seeking equality in distribution too; but justice is something distinct. The utilitarian is sometimes said to be indifferent between equal and unequal distributions provided that total utility is equal.__ This is so; but it conceals two important utilitarian grounds for a fairly high degree of actual goods (tempered, of course, as in most systems including Rawls’s by various advantages that are secured by moderate inequalities). The second is that inequalities tend to produce, at any rate in educated societies, envy hatred and malice whose disutility needs no emphasizing. I am convinced that when these two factors are taken into account, utilitarians have no feed to fear the accusation that they could favor extreme inequalities of distribution in actual modern societies. Fantastic hypothetical cases can no doubt be invented in which they would have to favor them; but as, as we shall see, this is an illegitimate form of argument.


 * 1) **Conflicting moral claims are inevitable – this necessitates utilitarianism.**
 * Mulholland, prof. of philosophy at the** **University** **of** **Newfoundland****, 1986** (Leslie, //Journal of Philosophy//, June, p. 328)

For many, __the persuasiveness of utilitarianism as a moral theory lies in its power to provide a way out of difficulties arising from the conflict of moral principles. The contention that utilitarianism permits people to override rights in case of conflict of principles or in those cases where some recognized utility requires that a right be disregarded, is then not an internal objection to utilitarianism.__ Nor does it even indicate a plausible alternative to the convinced utilitarian. For him, __utilitarianism has its force partly in the coherence and simplicity of the principle in explaining the morality of such cases.__