Consequentialism mini-lecture
Remember, class answered questions in survey about ethics being about what
happens, or judging a person by actions, not speech.
Implies an emphasis on consequences is a public morality. And it's in
policymaking, not personal professional ethics that we see it most at work.
Different varieties. Most influential is utilitarianism.
Egotism
Anybody read any Ayn Rand? What do you think? The intelligent, creative leader
trying to create a better world despite being dragged down by dull bureaucrats....
But mostly egotism is a straw-man ethics that ethics needs good response to.
Why should I care about anybody else? It's a dog-eat-dog world, etc... Won't go
into that in this course.
But egotism DOES apply and is taken seriously at the public level. Company
interest and national interest are not obviously illegitimate. Much of business law,
ideology, economics and international politics assumes underlying competition &
exercise of power. Think about this.... What (if any) limits are there to pursuing
one’s company interest as a professional?
Reflection on cost-benefit analysis exercise
1. Did anybody get a result that they "didn't want"? Does this invalidate the whole
process? Is it really a decision procedure, or is it really a way to surface weights
and ascribed values?
2. How sensitive is the outcome to the assignment of numbers to outcomes? Is it
reasonable to reduce everything to commensurable numbers? Why 1,3,9 and not
1,2,3 or 1,5,25? Wouldn't these accidental choices of procedure make a big
difference? Are the numbers sensitive to probabilities of outcomes as well as
their values? (cf. decision analysis)
3. Who says that some stakeholders deserve more weight than others? (But it
forces you to be explicit.)
4. What about rules or principles that trump all of these issues? E.g.
constitutional protections of free speech in the case of PICS.
Basic notions of utilitarianism
Consequentialism without problems of self-interest/egotism. Liberalism (i.e.
