I would be a bit surprised if that was explicitly what Nate meant, but it is what we should be concerned about, in terms of being concerned about whether someone is a bad person.
To make my general claim clearer: “doing evil to bring about good, is still doing evil,” is necessarily true, for exactly the same reason that “blue objects touching white objects, are still blue objects,” is true.
I agree that many utilitarians understand their moral philosophy to recommend doing evil for the sake of good. To the extent that it does, their moral philosophy is mistaken. That does not necessarily mean that utilitarians are bad people, because you can be mistaken without being bad. But this is precisely the reason that when you present scenarios where you say, “would you be willing to do such and such a bad thing for the sake of good,” many utilitarians will reply, “No! That’s not the utilitarian thing to do!” And maybe it is the utilitarian thing, and maybe it isn’t. But the real reason they feel the impulse to say no, is that they are not bad people, and therefore they do not want to do bad things, even for the sake of good.
This also implies, however, that if someone understands utilitarianism in this way and takes it too seriously, they will indeed start down the road towards becoming a bad person. And that happened even in the context of the present discussion (understood more broadly to include its antecedents) when certain people insisted, saying in effect, “What’s so bad about lying and other deceitful tactics, as long as they advance my goals?”
I would be a bit surprised if that was explicitly what Nate meant, but it is what we should be concerned about, in terms of being concerned about whether someone is a bad person.
To make my general claim clearer: “doing evil to bring about good, is still doing evil,” is necessarily true, for exactly the same reason that “blue objects touching white objects, are still blue objects,” is true.
I agree that many utilitarians understand their moral philosophy to recommend doing evil for the sake of good. To the extent that it does, their moral philosophy is mistaken. That does not necessarily mean that utilitarians are bad people, because you can be mistaken without being bad. But this is precisely the reason that when you present scenarios where you say, “would you be willing to do such and such a bad thing for the sake of good,” many utilitarians will reply, “No! That’s not the utilitarian thing to do!” And maybe it is the utilitarian thing, and maybe it isn’t. But the real reason they feel the impulse to say no, is that they are not bad people, and therefore they do not want to do bad things, even for the sake of good.
This also implies, however, that if someone understands utilitarianism in this way and takes it too seriously, they will indeed start down the road towards becoming a bad person. And that happened even in the context of the present discussion (understood more broadly to include its antecedents) when certain people insisted, saying in effect, “What’s so bad about lying and other deceitful tactics, as long as they advance my goals?”
I agree that this exists, and claim that it ought to be legitimate discourse to claim that someone else is doing it.