Please read “Traditional Male Circumcision in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Systematic Review of Prevalence and Complications” at https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/270816.
After doing so, address the following question:
Is there a line between protecting cultural traditional healing and protecting people’s lives/health? If so, what is the line? Who determines it?
In many African societies, male circumcision is carried out for cultural reasons, particularly as an initiation ritual and a rite of passage into manhood. However, serious complications and even deaths have been reported from traditional male circumcision carried out on adolescents. While medical male circumcision is increasingly being incorporated in comprehensive strategies for the prevention of HIV infection, traditional providers will continues to be an important source of circumcision for many males in eastern and southern Africa and will not easily be replaced by male circumcision performed in a clinical setting for reasons that are both cultural and linked to health service capacity.
uld be no trust that people are obeying rules if the comman man would just make decisions that allowed any kind of violations of law or cheating for sake of maximising good.
Bernard Williams argued consequentialism required impartiality which focuses on consequences of action and this requirement deprives an individual of their own integrity because the concept of utilitarianism doesn’t differentiate in a person themselves bringing about an outcome vs someone else producing an outcome.
Practically rule consequentialism proves to maximise utility in situations such as traffic rules. It would be safer if everyone followed rules like ‘no drunk driving or speed limit.’ Hence its safer to follow rule utility over act utility in such cases. Act utility would give room for individuals to determine the best action.
A rule based system leads to greater overall utility because people are capable of having bad judgement. Having specific rules to follow maximizes utility by not relying on the drivers’ judgments that could possibly endanger others or themselves too. For instance, based on an individual drivers’ judgements not following the road stop signs over some emergency could endanger many. The stop sign would distinctly set the rule and tell drivers to stop and does not allow them to calculate whether it would be better to stop or not.
Rule consequentialism avoids criticisms of act consequentialism. According to critics, act consequentialism approves of actions that can be wrong, undermine justice, undermine basic trust among people, and its demanding because it requires people to make sacrifices.
Rule consequentialists avoids underming trust because they do not evaluate individual actions separately and instead support rules that maximize utility.
Many of the rules would maximize utility. For example, rules that clearly distinguish the right and wrong in medical practice where doctors would clearly not be allowed to use one healthy patients organs to save five other patient lives, even if saving five patients results in maximum good. Else no one would trust doctors or the benefits of medical treatment.
In defence of rule utility, Brak Hooker pointed out the different contexts in wh