Moral intuition is a standard by which human action can be judged (Refuting John Stewart Mill’s claim)
JMJ
Moral intuition is a standard by which human action can be judged (Refuting John Stewart Mill’s claim)
Clifford Hearn
Foundations of Ethics with Dr. Harold
C.S. Lewis wrote, “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.” [1] In other words, there can be no structure to thought, no order to logic, if there is not at the root of these things an immediate and self-evident knowledge of the nature of a thing through intuition. In John Stuart Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’, he claims that the moral goodness of a human action cannot be judged by moral intuition, because moral intuition is too disputed, that no two schools of thought actually agree on it. In this paper, I seek to prove that moral intuition is in fact a standard by which human action should be judged, because moral intuition recognizes the ontological value of human beings, is foundational and self-evident, and that it is ordered toward the natural law. Utilitarianism has proven to have dire consequences for our world, and this is because of its denial of moral intuition.
John Stuart Mill, through his Greatest Happiness Principle, a set of ethical teaching known as Utilitarianism, seeks to bring about the greatest good in the world by setting into play a morality that gives happiness to the largest number of people possible. Mill argues that the purpose of morality is to benefit mankind, and thus the ultimate end of morality lies in providing the most amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people. In The Greatest Happiness Principle, human actions are measured by their consequences. For example, if one were a ruler of ten million people, and a famine had diminished the food supply to that which only half of those people could survive on; to kill off five million people would not only be justified but morally obligatory. After all, in this scenario, without the death of five million
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan,
Moral intuition is a standard by which human action can be judged (Refuting John Stewart Mill’s claim)
Clifford Hearn
Foundations of Ethics with Dr. Harold
C.S. Lewis wrote, “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.” [1] In other words, there can be no structure to thought, no order to logic, if there is not at the root of these things an immediate and self-evident knowledge of the nature of a thing through intuition. In John Stuart Mill’s ‘Utilitarianism’, he claims that the moral goodness of a human action cannot be judged by moral intuition, because moral intuition is too disputed, that no two schools of thought actually agree on it. In this paper, I seek to prove that moral intuition is in fact a standard by which human action should be judged, because moral intuition recognizes the ontological value of human beings, is foundational and self-evident, and that it is ordered toward the natural law. Utilitarianism has proven to have dire consequences for our world, and this is because of its denial of moral intuition.
John Stuart Mill, through his Greatest Happiness Principle, a set of ethical teaching known as Utilitarianism, seeks to bring about the greatest good in the world by setting into play a morality that gives happiness to the largest number of people possible. Mill argues that the purpose of morality is to benefit mankind, and thus the ultimate end of morality lies in providing the most amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people. In The Greatest Happiness Principle, human actions are measured by their consequences. For example, if one were a ruler of ten million people, and a famine had diminished the food supply to that which only half of those people could survive on; to kill off five million people would not only be justified but morally obligatory. After all, in this scenario, without the death of five million
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan,