DEAR EDITOR
Dear Editor Medical Utilitarianism In his review essay on David J. Rothman's Strangers at the Bedside and Carl N. Degler's In Search of Human Nature ("The Greatest Good," NL, August 12-26),...
...Denver, Col...
...But he is also nowhere near as unusual as some might imagine...
...The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...This makes him more "democratic" than the members of your own shameful American Electoral College...
...Although utilitarian theory, both in its classical and modern variants, is open to serious criticism, none of its manifestations implies that the end justifies the means...
...the imperfection of ethical systems characterized by organized inequality is that sympathy and all those relations into which sympathy enters, and all that happiness of which sympathy is the root, remain incomplete...
...In describing the lives they lead, in giving meaning to their experiences, they tend to adopt a narrative form that makes them superb story tellers, and naturally attracts the attention of social recorders like myself...
...he proposed, among other things, to give local authorities the power of forcibly "detaining and employing" anyone "having neither visible nor assignable property, nor honest or sufficient means of livelihood...
...Britain's Far Left As a devoted British Labor Party reader of your clear magazine when over here on teaching and other activist assignments, I was very upset by Robert J. Alexander'0 "Britain's Fading Far Left" (August 12-26...
...C. Thomas Bastien Thomas J. Cottle replies: I appreciate, and am encouraged by, C. Thomas Bastien's reaction to Dr...
...Lakoff's demurral notwithstanding, utilitarianism "allows the sacrifice of the good of some individuals for that of a majority...
...La Jolia, Calif...
...Bastien might be interested to learn that I showed drafts of my manuscript to Dr...
...It also contained serious factual inaccuracies...
...Paulie is nowhere near as "usual" as his "profession" in his community...
...It was uncomradely in its anti-working class spirit and, indeed, could easily have been written by the far Right Major-That cherite Fleet Street press...
...Dear Editor Medical Utilitarianism In his review essay on David J. Rothman's Strangers at the Bedside and Carl N. Degler's In Search of Human Nature ("The Greatest Good," NL, August 12-26), Roger Draper follows Rothman into an initial error in describing experimentation on human subjects without their consent as "medical utilitarianism" and only compounds the error by making Social Darwinism another form of utilitarianism...
...The general political demand for a host of civil rights," adduced as the second important reason for the transformation of American medicine, came from a civil rights movement steeped in natural rights...
...Paulies out theremost of them, thankfully, not selling drugs, but many of them languishing in dreadful schools...
...It was not doctors who began requiring informed consent...
...the interests of a noble, for example, should have no more individual weight than those of a commoner, and the more numerous commoners should therefore prevail politically...
...Bastien is right about one thing: The speech patterns I have reproduced—and barely edited (shortened)—are not typical of the children of Dr...
...Bentham was no civil libertarian...
...The "Militant Tendency" is not "Britain's leading Trotskyite Party," nor is it "the most prominent and powerful of these [Trotskyite groups] for the past 20 years...
...Its originator, Herbert Spencer, did not accept the egalitarian premise of utilitarianism and explicitly advocated the sacrifice of the weak and infirm for the sake of evolutionary progress...
...Second, as to the Communist Party having been in effective control of the Union of National Mineworkers during its long years under the rule of Arthur Horner and his immediate successors, I don't think that is even open to question...
...Dr...
...Paulie...
...Besides, in matters of health policy (as in the rationing of scarce resources like kidney machines or whether to allow abortion), can bioethicists rely on natural rights alone without also using some sort of utilitarian felicific calculus to compare need, maximize (Bentham's word) benefit, and respect different individual moral preferences...
...Thus] the unlikenesses presupposed between permanently ruling classes and permanently subject classes negative that highest happiness a rational ethics takes for its end...
...Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one" upholds only the former...
...Second, while historically I am prepared to concede to Alexander that once in the 1950s the Amalgamated Engineering Union was controlled by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), it is Tory tosh to say the Communists had control of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) too...
...Kansas City, Mo...
...that was forced upon them...
...Other economically poor boys and girls I speak with, though, similarly challenge our preconceptions of America's children growing up in poverty...
...Being committed to the welfare of individuals and of society as a whole, the 19th-century Philosophical Radicals inspired by Bentham led the campaign for the democratic reform of suffrage as well as for other progressive measures...
...And Paulie's speech is remarkably free of repetition...
...As Mill wrote in Utilitarianism, it means that "one person's happiness...
...and arguments against it usually took a utilitarian form...
...Paulie's three teachers, and not one recognized him...
...And to the shame of many of us radical but democratic Socialists, the SWP provided most of the brilliant young orators—the future George Bernard Shaws and Shirley Williamses—who, with the 30 labor MPs led by Tony Benn, denounced President George Bush's too easy resort to Gulf oil war killing...
...instead of saying the greatest happiness of all, it becomes necessary to use the expression, the greatest happiness of the greatest number...
...As to my alleged error in making Social Darwinism a form of utilitarianism, and Herbert Spencer's supposed rejection of its "egalitarian premise," in Principles of Ethics he says...
...Only in Scotland, where they championed genuine grievances like pit closures and lung disease, have the Communists ever elected a union general secretary...
...is counted for exactly as much as another's...
...When the relationship is right, when vulnerabilities are transcended and there is no hidden set of expectations, children do speak about their own circumstances in ways that seem surprising, jarring, somehow not quite right, perhaps "too good or too bad...
...Paulie's Snowstorm" (NL, August 12-26...
...I frankly believe that, while the story could be basically true, the words attributed to Raymond Crighton are too good or too bad to be accurate quotations from a mostly uneducated 13-year-old street dealer in cocaine...
...If the article is semifictionalized, or if the direct quotations have been edited for continuity, then that should have been stated by the author or the editors...
...Confusion on this score may arise from the contention of critics that pursuit of the "greatest good of the greatest number" allows the sacrifice of the good of some individuals for that of a majority...
...This may be so, though the evidence for the conclusion is not provided, but surely the main reasons doctors began requiring informed consent are, first, fear of being sued for malpractice, and second, ripple effects from the general political demand for a host of civil rights (however philosophically grounded...
...The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has that honor...
...Marx was right to call it a slander on the human race...
...Linguistically, he stands out...
...They were stunned by his daily activities, and even more by his brain power—something, apparently, they had never encountered...
...Their doctrine has often been fairly criticized because its exclusive emphasis on happiness may give dangerously short shrift to liberty, compared with natural rights or contractarian theories...
...Paulie's age and social group...
...I can hardly believe that anyone does, Bentham himself noted (in his Constitutional Code) that the "happiness of every individual is liable to come into competition with the happiness of every other...
...Utilitarianism does not, as Lakoff argues, demand "the equal happiness of all individuals...
...Observers like Robert Coles, Jonathan Kozol and Marian Edelman have noted the range of youthful intellect and expressiveness...
...Sanford Lakoff Professor of Political Science University of Calif ornia, San Diego Roger Draper replies: Sanford Lakoff fails to distinguish between two aspects of democracy: majority rule and individual rights...
...president, Arthur Scargill, left the CPGB years ago and supports continental European style fair preference voting as a Labor Party member...
...Moreover, in my essay I myself made Lakoff's point that natural rights do not help us choose among the claims of different people...
...Hence...
...John Stuart Mill answered this misinterpretation unambiguously by citing Jeremy Bentham's dictum, "Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one...
...They have demonstrated, too, that there are a host of Dr...
...Not all utilitarians were Social Darwinists, but Social Darwinists were utilitarians...
...The extraordinary popularity of this doctrine in the United States during the Gilded Age may help explain the readiness of doctors who went into practice earlier in this century to treat human subjects as guinea pigs (as it explains the interest of other professionals in eugenics, according to Degler), but this is hardly evidence of the influence of utilitarianism...
...Because it calls for the equal happiness of all individuals, the doctrine altogether precludes any sacrifice of the happiness (and a fortiori the life) of some for that of others...
...Lakoff's remarks on bioethics are mistaken on several counts...
...First, of all the Trotskyite factions in Britain, only the Militant Tendency has for decades been able to control the Labor Party youth group, and to elect at least a few Labor MPs as well as numerous municipal officials...
...The classical version has also been faulted for failing to recognize the difficulty of measuring, weighing and comparing individual "utilities...
...Whatever he might have thought about the enrollment of the very poor in experiments—and in my opinion, he might have approved—Rothman's use of the term "medical utilitarianism" is reasonable...
...The NUM's national (British...
...It might be possible to do so with a felicific calculus, but surely this would sacrifice the interests of some individuals to the "general good...
...Draper also reports Rothman's contention that "outsider" bioethicists have helped reorient medical practice by emphasizing natural rights rather than utilitarianism...
...Lawrence Iles History Instructor, Johnson County Community College (Labor candidate, May 1991, Hove Municipality) Robert J. A lexander replies: I think my lifelong career as a Social Democrat is a sufficient response to Lawrence lies' castigation of me as a Thatcherite, so I will confine myself to the two factual points he raises...
...My experience tells me that speech from members of Paulie's group does not flow in long paragraphs, but is more a matter of sentences punctuated with "you know" as a conjunction or general purpose space and time filler...
...And my entire report rests on the exquisite language as well as the sophisticated thinking of a boy with an adorable face and a perfectly unbelievable life style that may well get him killed before he is eligible to vote...
...I spoke of CPGB control of the NUM in the past tense, not the present tense...
...As the piece stands it simply does not ring true...
...Too often when young people's words are captured within quotation marks, adults' eyes jump to the next full paragraph of so-called "real" text...
...Doubting Dr· Paulie Over the weekend I read Thomas J. Cottle's "Dr...
...Butin no form does utilitarianism deserve to be made a whipping boy for immoralities it does not sanction or advocate...
...The line about the microwave oven is uncomfortably close to the old joke about the thermos bottle...
...Only it, too, has won control of some of the smaller national unions...
...Social Darwinism is another kettle of fish—in which the big eat the little...
Vol. 74 • September 1991 • No. 10
