Utilitarians must also reject inalienable rights and considerations of distributive justice, as well as principles of desert and retribution, or of purity and hierarchy.

And so on. A utilitarian must reject all deontological constraints on the pursuit of the greater good. But, again, it is obviously a mistake to assume that if someone rejects some deontological norms, let alone a single BMS-754807 order deontological constraint relating to personal harm in a specific, unusual context, then they must also reject all such norms, or even many of them. For example, someone can reject a specific deontological constraint on directly harming others while still holding extreme deontological views about other moral questions (such as that lying is absolutely forbidden), Decitabine solubility dmso or radical libertarian views about property rights. Consider an analogy: an atheist would typically rejects all religious rules, but of course the fact that someone rejects a religious rule against, say, eating pork hardly amounts to any interesting step in the direction of atheism, let alone count as an ‘atheist judgment.’ Needless to say, someone making such a judgment may in fact be a Christian fundamentalist Recent research on sacrificial dilemmas has overlooked these points. It has mistakenly treated the rejection (or discounting) of a single intuitive deontological constraint relating to harm in a specific,

unusual context, as a significant step in a utilitarian direction, and it has mistakenly assumed that when subjects instead endorse an act that will save a larger number of lives in this special context, then this endorsement must express an impartial utilitarian concern for the greater good. Yet such supposedly ‘utilitarian’ judgments reflect only a very narrow aspect of the negative side of utilitarianism. At the same time, they may reflect little or nothing of utilitarianism’s core positive side: the moral aim of impartially maximizing aggregate well-being.

One robust result of the present study is that there appears to be no interesting relationship between Plasmin so-called ‘utilitarian’ judgment and this positive core of a utilitarian approach to ethics. The consistent association between ‘utilitarian’ judgment and antisocial tendencies is a striking illustration of the above points. In particular, recent research has overlooked the fact that the negative dimension of utilitarianism is also shared by views that are otherwise radically opposed to it. For example, egoists also approach practical questions in a calculating, no-nonsense manner, and are quick to dismiss many common moral intuitions and sentiments. Needless to say, however, egoists utterly reject the positive core of a utilitarian outlook, holding instead that we should care about (and maximize) only what is in our own self-interest.