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Utilitarian Ethics In Hurricane Katrina

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Recommended: Impact of hurricanes on humans and their environment

From the previous chapters one may conclude that engineering role had a significant impact on occurrence and scale of Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. According to ASCE report (2007), major part of the damage from hurricane was caused by the failure of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to provide reliable flood protection system. However, despite this fact the role of the government should not be omitted since it has a major power when it comes to funding of such kind of urban projects. McGee (2008) considers Hurricane Katrina to be a “classic example of government failure”. Thereby, he places the blame for sporadic funding of the flood protection system on the federal government represented by the US Congress. According to McGee (2008), this …show more content…

The utilitarian ethics states: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” Thus, addressing the statistical data on New Orleans population, there were almost 500,000 people living there before the hurricane, whereas population of the United States comprised of more that 300 million people both citizens and residents (Plyer 2015). Therefore, one may come to the conclusion that utilitarian ethics did not work in this situation since population of New Orleans was only 0.17% of the total US population. Moreover, according to McGee (2008), the utilitarianism ethics would not be applicable for coming to the aid of the people (0.3%) who suffered from the hurricane in the cities located along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. “Thus, if the federal government passes legislation to come to the aid of Katrina victims, it is clearly special interest legislation, which is unconstitutional, since there is nothing in the constitution that allows the federal government to come to the aid of any group that is less than a super majority,”- McGee (2008) states. Therefore, it is better for federal government to stay aside of such ethical issues since being responsible for disaster does not imply being in charge for reconstruction of the

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