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Taking Justice Too Seriously

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Peter Vallentyne
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Extract

One of the standard objections to traditional act utilitarianism is that it is insensitive to issues of justice and desert. Traditional act utilitarianism holds, for example, that it is morally obligatory to torture or kill an innocent person, when doing so increases the happiness of others more than it decreases the happiness of the innocent person. Utilitarianism is, of course, sensitive to what people believe about justice (for example, people might riot, if they believe a gross injustice has been done), but it is not sensitive to justice itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , November 1995 , pp. 207 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Feldman, Fred, Confrontations with the Reaper, Oxford, 1992; ‘Adjusting Utility for Justice’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming.Google Scholar

2 Feldman, Fred, ‘Justice, Desert, and the Repugnant Conclusio’, Utilitas, vii (1995); 189–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Once the assumption of constant marginal desert proportional to absolute desert is dropped, some assumption connecting absolute and marginal desert is needed. A natural, and plausible, assumption is that increases in absolute desert increase marginal desert. More carefully: if one absolute desert level is greater than a second, then (1) for all levels of increment, the marginal desert associated with the first absolute desert level is at least as great as the marginal desert associated with the second, and (2) for at least one level, the marginal desert of the first is greater.

4 For an explanation and defence of this view, see Vallentyne, Peter, ‘Rights-Based Paretianism’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, xviii (1988), 89–101.Google Scholar

5 This summarizes P1–P6 of Feldman, 's ‘Adjusting Utility for Justice’.Google Scholar

6 Roughly this point is also made in Persson, Ingmar's ‘Feldman's Justicized Act, Utilitarianism’, RatioGoogle Scholar, forthcoming.