Utilitarizmus, ľudské práva a naše morálne intuície

The paper deals with the relation between utilitarianism and moral intuitions in the context of philosophical justification of human rights. The author responds to Martin Hapla’s effort to show the harmony of these three categories and offers some (counter-)examples that partially complicate the idea of such harmony. In the center of the author’s attention is the question of sacrifice of the innocent. He points particularly to the issue of civilian immunity in time of war and also the issue of inadmissibility of torture. He tries to explain the difference between these phenomena, which are covered by absolute rights nowadays, and other phenomena which represent “ordinary” human rights situations. From this difference, he draws a conclusion about the utilitarian permissibility of exceptional legal sacrifices of innocents, which, however, is not in a complete accordance with our moral intuition.