Why Do Ethics Classes Fantasize About Murder So Much?
At a post-screening discussion where I questioned the director of Eye in the Sky about the disconnect between his drone-kill movie and reality, he launched into a bunch of thought-experiment stuff of the sort I've tried to avoid since finishing my master's in philosophy. Mostly I've avoided hanging out with torture supporters.
If this were a philosophy paper I would now tell you that I am going to show that consequentialism is the most useful ethical framework. Then I would show you that. Then I would tell you I'd just shown you that. And the annoyingness would be only beginning. Luckily, I'm out of school and have told you my central concern in the headline.
Consequentialism, the idea that we should base our actions on the good or bad of the expected consequences, has always been very troubling to philosophy professors, possibly because of some of these reasons:
> It leaves ethics up to humans without any sort of pseudo-divine guidance.
> It means otherwise brilliant people like Immanuel Kant were quite wrong.
> Concluding that consequentialism is the way to go would eliminate the entire academic discipline of debating what is the way to go.
