CONSEQUENCES

[摘要] Consequences as they are anticipated are certainly among the criteria we use in deciding what we ought to do. But they can't be decisive in crucial cases. First, in many situations, predicting consequences is an idle occupation just because we can't know; to claim that we can is to play at being God. The decisions to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki are melancholy evidence of this....Secondly, whether or not a man has a given virtue (veracity, for example, or justice) is settled by noting how he behaves in some of those cases where calculation about consequences doesn't seem to matter and might even appear, in an affair of such moment, ludicrous.... (those doctors who in the death camps refused to perform medical experiments, even though they knew these experiments would be performed by others).

[学科分类] 儿科学