XmasDVD
05-30-2008, 12:03 PM
Found this tidbit....
Utilitarianism as such does nothing to protect Individual Rights. Bentham himself is quite explicit about this, since he rejects the dominant British natural rights tradition that went back at least to John Locke and in Bentham's own lifetime had been embodied in the United States Constitution. Nevertheless, Bentham calls it all "Nonsense on stilts." This is the most notorious thing about Bentham's theory. An implicit criticism of it appears to occur in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), where we have the moral problem of whether a perfect society would be worth it if such a thing could be achieved at the cost of constantly torturing a single child. This was turned into a science fiction story by Ursula Le Guin. Dostoevsky, of course, was a Christian and would countenance no "ends justify the means" construction of morality.
SOURCE: http://www.friesian.com/bentham.htm
Utilitarianism as such does nothing to protect Individual Rights. Bentham himself is quite explicit about this, since he rejects the dominant British natural rights tradition that went back at least to John Locke and in Bentham's own lifetime had been embodied in the United States Constitution. Nevertheless, Bentham calls it all "Nonsense on stilts." This is the most notorious thing about Bentham's theory. An implicit criticism of it appears to occur in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), where we have the moral problem of whether a perfect society would be worth it if such a thing could be achieved at the cost of constantly torturing a single child. This was turned into a science fiction story by Ursula Le Guin. Dostoevsky, of course, was a Christian and would countenance no "ends justify the means" construction of morality.
SOURCE: http://www.friesian.com/bentham.htm