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Scarre on Evil Pleasures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Hugh Upton
Affiliation:
University of Wales, Swansea, [email protected]

Abstract

Utilitarianism faces a difficulty in that what are typically regarded as natural goods seem to have possible occurrences that strike most people as morally reprehensible, yet which according to the theory must be taken to add to the good in the world. Thus, totake a recent treatment of the problem by Geoffrey Scarre, it would seem that even sadistic pleasures must contribute to human happiness and thus morally offset the concomitant suffering of the victim. Scarre has offered a defence of utilitarianism, arguing that in fact such pleasures will undermine the self-respect that is required for happiness. In this paper I argue that a partial undermining is plausible but leaves the problem untouched, while a complete undermining can be established only by a stipulation that is unmotivated from a utilitarian point of view.

Type
Discussions
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

1 See Scarre, Geoffrey, ‘Utilitarianism and Self-Respect’, Utilitas, iv (1992)Google Scholar, and the similar account in Scarre, , Utilitarianism, London, 1996, pp. 155 fGoogle Scholar. All parenthetical page references are to the latter work.

2 Contrasting, for example, with R. B. Brandt's notion of ‘mistaken’ desires, which are those that (contingently) disappear or moderate when confronted repeatedly and vividly with all the relevant available information. See Brandt, , A Theory of the Good and the Right, Oxford, 1979, pp. 110–15Google Scholar.