The end of Warren Weinstein's life raises painful questions about the morality and the utility of drones.
As Andrew O'Malley points out in his analysis of 18th-century children's books, "middle-class writers wanted children to associate happiness with morality and social utility instead" of "the trappings of wealth and status".
Instead, morality should maximize utility in this life, while we are alive and after we are gone (should these be the goals of our moral code).
Greeting every experience — his father's funeral, a pile of severed hands, an abused girl (Ravshana Kurkova) — with a single, stunned expression, he questions not only his faith but also the utility of morality.
A sense of shiftiness set in the central sense of expediency, and instead of "suitable," it became "politic," more concerned with utility than with morality, setting ends ahead of means, too willing to compromise principles in a lust for power and pelf.
It is the central theme of ethical theories such as utilitarianism (the principle of utility) and common morality theories.
They simply assume that the best life is one of adherence to yi (morality, duty) and thus of promoting overall utility.
As basis for morality, Mill believed that his principle of utility has a stronger intuitive grounding that Kant's reliance on reason, and can better explain why certain actions are right or wrong.
Others accept the utility of such sanctions but question their morality.
He holds that a morality of rights and a morality of consequences or utility co-exist in our moral outlook in such a way that although rights trump utility in normal circumstances, a "utilitarianism of extremity" rightly overrides the morality of rights in some rare circumstances.
