SS+Consequentialism+good+FL

Ignatieff, Carr prof. of human rights at Harvard, 2004 (Michael, Carr professor of human rights at Harvard, 2004 //Lesser Evils// p. 18-19)
 * 1) **The War on Terror makes rights violations inevitable – the only way to prevent escalation is to reject utopian ideas of politics and learn to make policy based on consequences of implementation.**

To insist that justified exercises of coercion can be defined as a lesser evil is to say that evil can be qualified. If two acts are evil, how can we say that one is the lesser, the other the greater? Qualifying evil in this way would seem to excuse it. Yet it is essential to the idea of a lesser evil that one can justify resort to it without denying that it is evil, justifiable only because other means would be insufficient or unavailable. Using the word evil rather than the word harm is intended to highlight the elements of moral risk that a liberal theory of government believes are intrinsic to the maintenance of order in any society premised upon the dignity of individuals. Thus even in times of safety, liberal democracies seek to limit the use of force necessary to their maintenance. These limits seek to balance the conflict between the commitments to individual dignity incarnated in rights and the commitments to majority interest incarnated in popular sovereignty. In times of danger, this conflict of values becomes intense. The suppression of civil liberties, surveillance of individuals, targeted assassination, torture, and preemptive war put liberal commitments to dignity under such obvious strain, and the harms they entail are so serious, that, even if mandated by peremptory majority interest, they should be spoken of only in the language of evil. In a war on terror, I would argue, the issue is not whether we can avoid evil acts altogether, but whether we can succeed in choosing lesser evils and keep them from becoming greater ones. We should do so, I would argue, by making some starting commitments—to the conservative principle (maintaining the free institutions we have), to the dignity principle (preserving individuals from gross harms)—and then reasoning out the consequences of various courses of action, anticipating harms and coming to a rational judgment of which course of action is likely to inflict the least damage on the two principles. When we are satisfied that a coercive measure is a genuine last resort, justified by the facts as we can understand them, we have chosen the lesser evil, and we are entitled to stick to it even if the price proves higher than we anticipated. But not indefinitely so. At some point—when we "have to destroy the village in order to save it"—we may conclude that we have slipped from the lesser to the greater. Then we have no choice but to admit our error and reverse course. In the situation of factual uncertainty in which most decisions about terrorism have to be taken, error is probably unavoidable. It is tempting to suppose that moral life can avoid this slope simply by avoiding evil means altogether. But no such angelic option may exist. Either we fight evil with evil or we succumb. So if we resort to the lesser evil, we should do so, first, in full awareness that evil is involved. Second, we should act under a demonstrable state of necessity. Third, we should chose evil means only as a last resort, having tied everything else. Finally, we must satisfy a fourth obligation: we must justify our actions publicly to our fellow citizens and submit to their judgment as to their correctness.


 * 1) **Ethical tradeoffs make consequentialism the only viable framework – all others are utopian.**
 * Spragens, prof. of polisci at Duke, 2000** (Thomas, “Political Theory and Partisan Politics”, p. 81-2)

My thesis that all three layers/forms of political association are important in a well-ordered liberal democracy also implies the untenability of Rawls's argument that agreement regarding norms of social justice is a possible and sufficient way to overcome the deficiencies of the modus vivendi approach. In the first place, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, the fundamental unfairness of life and the presence of gratuitous elements in the moral universe make it impossible to settle rationally upon a single set of distributive principles as demonstrably fair (See also, Spragens 1993). Simply put, the problem is that the contingencies of the world ineluctably allocate assets and sufferings quite unfairly. __We can cope with and try to compensate for these "natural injustices," but only at the price of introducing other elements of unfairness or compromising other moral values. The other major problem in this context is that real world human beings are not deontologists: their moral intuitions about distributive justice are permeated and influenced by their moral intuitions about the good__. The empirical consequence of these two difficulties is the falsification of Rawls's hermeneutic claims about an overlapping consensus. __Rational people of good will with a liberal democratic persuasion will be able to agree that some possible distributive criteria are morally unacceptable. But, as both experience and the literature attest, hopes for a convergence of opinion on definitive principles of distributive justice are chimerical.__

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 * 1) **Morality must be removed from policymaking decisions because of its inherent focus on the individual – consequentialism is key.**
 * Brock, prof. of philosophy at** **Brown** **University****, 1987** (Dan W., “Ethics”, July, p. 787)

My point is rather that __the different goals of academic scholarship and public policy call in turn for different virtues and behavior__ in their practitioners. Philosophers who steadfastly maintain their academic ways in the public policy setting are not to be admired as islands of integrity in a sea of messy political compromise and corruption. Instead, I believe that __if philosophers maintain the academic virtues there they will not only find themselves often ineffective but will__ as well often __fail__ in their responsibilities and act wrongly. Why is this so? The central point of conflict is that __the first concern of those responsible for public policy is, and ought to be, the consequences of their actions for public policy and the persons that those policies affect. This is not to say that they should not be concerned with the moral evaluation of those consequences__—they should; nor that they must be moral consequentialists in the evaluation of the policy, and in turn human, consequences of their actions—__whether some form of consequentialism is an adequate moral theory is another matter. But it is to say that persons who directly participate in the formation of public policy would be irresponsible if they did not focus their concern on how their actions will affect policy and how that policy will in turn affect people.__


 * 1) **Even weighing rights demands consequentialism.**
 * Waldron, 1993** (Jeremy, “Liberal Rights”, //Collected Papers:// //Cambridge// //University// //Press//)

However, this approach will not deal with all moral conflicts and there is no reason to want it to. __Many conflicts__ whether __between rights and utility__ or among rights themselves - __are best handled in the sort of balancing way that the quantitative image of weight suggests: we establish the relative importance of the interests at stake__, and the contribution each of the conflicting duties may make to the importance of the interest it protects, and __we try to maximize our promotion of what we take to be important__. What we were looking for was something to capture our sense that this is not always the whole story - our sense that __sometimes__, or in some conflicts, the issue is one of qualitative precedence rather than quantitative weight. I think the idea of internal connections helps to capture some of that. And it does so in a way that means we do not have to give up the view that rights entail requirements of different sorts that are ordered in various ways in relation to other moral considerations. __We can establish qualitative priorities in some places, without thinking we have to establish qualitative priorities everywhere.__