3 ms·
>If a course of action where you do some amount of harm to mitigate a larger amount of harm would clearly result in a worse world, then you are NOT actually sum
by missingrib 5y ago
>If a course of action where you do some amount of harm to mitigate a larger amount of harm would clearly result in a worse world, then you are NOT actually summing up all the resulting negative utility in your so-called-utilitarian calculations.
This is kind of missing the point. Even if it were to result in a "better world", the intuition is that it is still wrong to murder the innocent man to save 5, just prima facie. This is a problem for the utilitarian.
Their best response might be to just bite the bullet, but it significantly weakens their argument overall.
- edanm 5y ago> Their best response might be to just bite the bullet, but it significantly weakens their argument overall. I disagree. To me it seems fairly obvious that it is morally correct to murder one innocent person to save 5 innocent people. Not only that, but we often as a society make this exact decision (e.g. send young people to fight in armies, send firefighters to rescue people despite potential harm to themselves, etc). I don't know why this supposedly weakens utilitarianism - the whole point of the philosophy is exactly to point out that this is the morally correct choice. The problem with this and the other examples in the article is that there's a big difference between the hypothetical examples often given, which assume no other effects, and the real world. In the real world, we often only allow these kinds of decisions in society-wide settings - e.g. the examples I gave above (armies, firefighters). We don't allow people to just choose on a case-by-case basis who should live or die, because it would cause far more problems (and thus, negative utility) to do so.