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(Another nice new discussion. - promoted by Seth Baum)
I've just read an interesting article on the political philosophy of John Rawls (http://tinyurl.com/578ba5). The article states that Rawls wrote his most famous work, A Theory of Justice, to overcome some of the problems of Utilitarianism. The example given in the article: "Suppose executing the Danish cartoonists will appease a Muslim mob, and that doing so increases total satisfaction. A utilitarian would have to endorse the execution."
This criticism of Utilitarianism, and all those of the same class, seem, in my opinion, to be fallacious. They arise because the criticisms often assume a sudden introduction and widespread acceptance of Utilitarianism by society at large, i.e, Instant Utilitarianism.
If we look at the example above, we can devise the following timeline:
t-1 A Danish cartoonist draws some satirical cartoons of Mohammad (PBUH).
t Utilitarianism is suddenly widely adopted.
t+1 The killing of this Danish cartoonist will increase total utility.
However, we must question why Utilitarianism was suddenly widely accepted and adopted at this point in the timeline? If it had occured at some point before t-1, it would have been right for the cartoonist, in a Utilitarian sense, to have never drawn the cartoon. It would also have been right for Muslims to develop and maintain less reactionary attitudess about pictorial depictions of their prophets.
As I've stated already, many counter-intuitive problems leveled against Utilitarianism seem to presume some form of Instant Utilitarianism (IU), a highly unlikely scenario that severely undermines such criticisms.
What are your opinions? Have any philosophers written about this topic?
