Monday 22 February 2010

Utilitarianism

So this was allegedly a weekly blog, and i think this may be my second post in two months awh well it is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. Tonight i was at a debate entitled "Christianity is an irrelevant and outdated belief system". Now surprisingly perhaps at this point im not going to attack the premise of the debate, but the proposer of this motion argued that Christianity led to a flawed morality by which the world should not be governed and instead propsed utilitarianism as an alternative, now for a olitics graduate like myself this greatly interested me. Utilitarianism is basically the belief that what should happen is the greatest good for the greatest number of people should be the thing that happens. Now i have 3 objections to this, two on a common sense basis and the other on a a more theolgical level. Firstly, what is for the greatest good today may not be for the greatest good tomorrow.So for example the policy of appeasement seemed like the greatest good at the time but later it emerged that all it served to do was allow Hitler time to build his resources. Secondly, what happens when the greatest good is in fact illegal. This was the justification for the war in Iraq, Tony Blair argued that what Sadaam Hussein was doing in Iraq was wrong and therefore the greatest thing to do for the greatest number was to invade and depose Hussein, but this was in fact an act of war in which many young men have died, so was this right? And finally and perhaps my biggest objection is who is to decide on what is the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Essentially what you are doing to that person is elevating them to a god, you are saying that youre reason is so much higher and so much better that you are the only one qualified to deliberate on such issues, you are making them god. Far from bringing a more egalitarian system all this will serve to do will be to consolidate the power for those whose reason is allegedly better, it will make them gods with the power over life and death, and there is only one God and he does not share His glory with any other