Lecture 3 Utilitarianism: An Introduction William Sin September, 2009. 1 1
What things are good? 2
Which things are bad? 3
Note the Difference between Intrinsic and Instrumental Goodness 4
What should we do? • Promote the Good • Maximize the Total Utility • The Greatest Happiness Principle: An act is right if and only if it promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. 5
Utilitarianism is about … 6
Utilitarianism and Consequentialism • Consequentialism is a form of moral theory which argues that the only factor which is worthy of our moral consideration is the consequence of actions. • Utilitarianism is a form of Consequentialism. Utilitarians believe that the only relevant consequence which is worth considering is the TOTAL HAPPINESS (or Total Utility). 7
Value Monism • Consequentialism: Pursuit of the overall good is the ONLY thing that we should do. • Utilitarianism: Apart from utility, no other things will carry intrinsic value. 8
Value Pluralism • Non-Consequentialism (Deontology): Pursuit of the good end is not the only thing we should do. • Deontology: Apart from pursuing good ends, people should also be honest, take care of their families, to keep promises, etc. 9
Negative Responsibility • On Utilitarianism, an action is wrong if an agent has not taken the most effective means to promote the overall good. • In this way, agents will be responsible for what they have not done as well as what they could have done. 10
(1) The Problem of Demandingness • The kind of action that agents can perform under Utilitarianism has been driven to an impossibly narrow range. • There is often only one thing that a person should do. 11
No room to do anything else? • “You are on your way to buy a stereo, when it occurs to you that the hundreds of dollars could do far more good were they sent instead to an appropriate charity. You are on your way out to eat, when it occurs to you that you could eat at home far more cheaply. … In each case, there is some ‘bare bones’ alternative available to you, and the savings could be sent to charity. ” Shelley Kagan, Normative Ethics, p. 156. 12
(2) The Problem of Trade-Offs • On Utilitarianism or Consequentialism, any sacrifice is acceptable (or required) as long as that causes the best outcome. • But sometimes, it just conflicts with our intuition that people should become an instrument for the promotion of the overall good. 13
Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility 14
(2) Fairness & Pareto Optimality • Can we tell the difference between acceptable acts of maximization and problematic one? Pareto Optimality Unfair Distribution A 1: {10, 10, 10, 10} TU = 40 A 2: {11, 12, 13} TU = 48 A 3: {2, 2, 25} TU = 54 15
The Transplant Problem 16
The Transplant Problem • A brilliant transplant surgeon has five children patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available for transplantation. A healthy young kid, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that her organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the child were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. 17
If killing is morally worse than letting die, why is it morally permissible for an agent to choose to throw the switch in TROLLEY?
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