Although this first Geneva Convention dealt only with the treatment of the sick and wounded on the battlefield, for the first time the humanitarians were setting rules on how the
utilitarians could conduct themselves on the battlefield.
However, the
utilitarian argument for such institutions should not be entirely unfamiliar to readers--Bailey acknowledges debts to Russell Hardin,(3) for example.
Similarly, he is an ambiguous
utilitarian, as Weinstein acknowledges, even if he enjoys a place in its history.
Utilitarians are concerned with amounts of value not with percentages of value.
To defend the moral rights of animals would be to claim that certain ways of treating animals cannot be justified on
utilitarian grounds.
Kant's and the
utilitarians' principles were designed to explain how individuals, not nations, justify their actions.
However, even if Audi were right that
utilitarians must sometimes praise the character of persons who--through abysmal "moral luck"--consistently produce bad results, while deeming their actions excusable wrongs, it is not clear that this "normative cleavage" (22) would be damning.
They will need to dismantle what is unchristian and
utilitarian in their old way of thinking and replace it by a moral analysis that helps them to find the will of God in the choices of every day.
It's what's wrong with much of modern economic thought, this
utilitarian rationalism--in Stigler's political economy as against Friedman's, or in Richard Posner's law and economy as against Ronald Coase's.
Thanks to critics from Charles Dickens to Michel Foucault, pre-20th century
utilitarian philosophers have gained a reputation as amoral libertines or cold rationalists, impervious to what people today might call "social justice." But William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, and other classical
utilitarians were dedicated humanists, deeply concerned with social reform, and often radically progressive on women's rights, sexual relations, and other cultural issues.
Utilitarians tolerate self-benefiting actions only in that context.
Logsdon asserts, "drawing instruction was viewed as a means to an economic end, [so] the policy philosophically shares more with the 'greater good' thesis espoused by
utilitarians than with pragmatism's notion of an individual's considered inquiry into an array of potential life consequences." (24) While she acknowledges the
utilitarian idea of "the greatest good for the greatest number," it is not clear whether she understands the connection between the ethical theory in its fullness.
