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Question of the Month

What Grounds or Justifies Morality?

Our readers give their reasons, each winning the right to a random book.

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature… Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Would you consent? Bentham’s utilitarianism justifies the morality of an action on the principle of ‘maximising the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ of people. Kant insists that one’s actions possess moral worth only when one does one’s duty for its own sake, and in this sense consequences are morally irrelevant.

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