Until Further Titling – Week 2; Covenantal Love
Consequentialism is the moral calculus of a robot or psychopath:
Utilitarianism has a superficially plausible method for solving moral decisions: the greatest good for the greatest number. If I can save five people from a speeding train by pushing a fat guy onto the railway track, why not? Out of six people, five are still alive.
But unless moral judgements can make room for imagination and empathy we could well end up with psychopaths making their way onto bioethics panels and, as far as output is concerned, nobody would be the wiser for that. Utilitarianism masks the need for real thought about means and ends and not just the most efficient techniques that get us to the outcomes we want. . . In the words of Daniel M. Bartels, of Columbia University, and David A. Pizarro, of Cornell University:
“We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.”
