From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 11:10:35 MST
Rafal wrote:
> ### Most people with severe deformities resent their disability
> (a fact). We have to use probabilistic arguments about the child,
> and assume that she will develop the common attitude, rather than
> her mother's idiosyncratic distaste for limbs. Therefore, the
> Golden Rule (in the form of veil of ignorance) demands that we
> act in the predicted interest of the child, and stop/punish her
> mother.
Kant's Categorical Imperative makes your conclusion even more obvious,
and without recourse to probabilistic arguments or predictions of the
particular child's subjective preferences.
The CI is "act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time will
that it should become a universal law."
>From the CI, I reason as follows: "The general welfare of humanity would
clearly be worsened if it were universally true that mothers severely
mutilated their children and if it were universally true that people
condoned such mutilations. Therefore I cannot condone such mutilations
and should attempt to prevent them."
In general, the CI goes a long way toward answering the question whose
business is it. If people are doing X, and if you think the world be
better off if no one did X, then you have moral justification to argue
against X. You might still be wrong, of course, but your error would
then be one of logic rather than morality.
-gts
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