Week 1 Post 1 Utilitarianism (Categorical/Consequentialist Reasoning)
All info is from EdX class Justice by Harvard
Lecture 1:
MORAL REASONING
Consequentialist- Locates morality in the consequences of an act (utilitarianism by Jeremy Bentham)
Categorical- Locates morality in certain duties and rights (Emmanuel Kant)
exercices to explore moral reasoning:
- Trolley car question-
- Hit 5 people with the trolley car or turn trolley car or hit 1
- The breaks on the trolley car don't work and will hit 5 people but you are on a bridge and there is a very fat man standing there and if you pushed him in the way of the track it would save the 5 but kill him
- my response to the "fat man" idea is that I would not push him and It would not be the same as the first scenario where you hit the one to save the 5 because you are actively adding outside contributors and influence so it becomes innately more complicated because now you (an outsider) are choosing to use the fat man to save the lives of others which removes free will and makes it a purposeful murder. direct or indirect involvement
- Emergency room concept-
- 6 patients come to you (a doctor) after being in a trolley car wreck
- 5 sustained moderate injuries, 1 is severely injured.
- You could spend all day caring for the one severely injured victim, but in that time five would die or you could look after the five and restore them to health but during that time the one severely injured would die
- Transplant surgeon
- 5 patients each in desperate need of an organ transplant in order to survive. One needs a heart, one needs a lung, one needs a liver, and the fifth needs a pancreas. You have no organ donors. They will all die without the transplant. Than it occurs to you that in the next room theres a healthy guy who came in for a check up. You could use all of his organs to save the five but then he would die. What would you do?
We examine these things not just to enliven abstract and distant books but to make clear and bring out what is at stake in our everyday lives including our political lives, for philosophy.
Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. The risk in this is that once the familiar turns strange it is never quite the same again.
self-knowledge is like lost innocence. It cannot be unthought or unknown.
Philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity.
"there's a dialogue, the Gorgias in which one of Socrates’ friends Calicles tries to talk him out of philosophizing. Calicles tells Socrates philosophy is a pretty toy if one indulges in it with moderation at the right time of life but if one pursues it further than one should it is absolute ruin. Take my advice Calicles says, abandon argument learn the accomplishments of active life, take for your models not those people who spend their time on these petty quibbles, but those who have a good livelihood and reputation and many other blessings. So Calicles is really saying to Socrates quit philosophizing, get real go to business school and calicles did have a point he had a point because philosophy distances us from conventions from established assumptions and from settled beliefs. those are the risks, personal and political and in the face of these risks there is a characteristic evasion, the name of the evasion is skepticism."
The reason we still cannot escape the questions all of these great philosophers asked all those years ago is that we live some answer to these questions every day.
The point of philosophy is to awaken the restlessness of reason and to see where it might lead you
Lecture 2:
Benthams Idea: The right/just thing to do is to maximize utility. The balance of pleasure over pain, Happiness over suffering. The right thing to do individually or collectively maximize the overall level of happiness. Utilitarianism: Greatest good for the greatest number
Queen vs. Dudley and Stephens
4 men stranded on a lifeboat at sea. The cabin boy (richard parker) was 17 with no family. They had a very limited supply of food and caught a turtle. They ran out of food and water. For 8 days they had no food/water. The cabin boy drank the sea water and appeared to be dying. Dudley the captain suggested they should have a lottery to see who would die to save the rest, Brooks refused. Dudley then said they should kill the cabin boy because he was dying anyways so they offered a prayer and killed him and they fed on the boy for the rest of the time they were stranded. When they were rescued they were arrested and tried for murder when they got back.
-They argued that one should die so that the three could survive
-Put aside the question of law, was what they did morally permissible?
-morally reprehensible but not legally accountable. Your degree of necessity does in fact exonerate you from any guilt.
-maybe because they hadn't been eating for that long period of time they weren't in a proper state of mind, so they were making decisions they might not make otherwise.
-lack of free will/choice in the matter. Asking for consent in the murder? in this situation would it be coerced consent
-With the reasoning that he could die for others to live, it is somewhat in vain. He is dying in hopes of them being rescued but what happens when he runs out? Do you kill the next member and so on and so forth?
-the flaw in their logic was that they decided at some point that their lives were more important than his and thats the basis for really any crime and if you used the lottery idea at least then it would be fair.
-Does context matter, Ex; They had children at home when the cabin boy didn't. the idea that affection and dependent are their motive. (do numbers and wider effects matter)
Questions raised:
1) Do we have certain fundamental rights?
2) Does a fair procedure justify any result?
3) What is the moral work of consent?
-Is morality a matter of counting lives and weighing costs and bene$ ts, or are certain moral duties
and human rights so fundamental that they rise above such calculations? And if certain rights are fundamental in this way—be they natural, or sacred, or inalienable, or categorical—how can we identify
them? And what makes them fundamental?
Lecture 3:
Can you assign a monetary value to human life? Cost benefit analysis
Philip Morris Study
Costs:
Increased health care costs
Benefits:
Tax revenue from cigarette sales, from early deaths there are health care savings, pension savings, and savings in housing costs
In the czech republic there is a 147 million dollar gain
Ford Pinto Case:
Costs:
$11 per part x 12.5 million cars = 137 million to improve safety
Benefits:
180 deaths x 200,000 + 180 injuries x 67,000 + 2000 vehicles x 700 = 49.5 million
^was it okay for them to assign the dollar value to life.
This sort of analysis shouldn't be applied to issues of human life
-Just because someone is in the minority doesn't mean that their rights and needs are less valuable than that of those in the majority
extra research:
Sacrificing Strangers vs. Helping Them: Two Dimensions of Utilitarian Psychology
- In order to study how our minds form moral judgments, psychologists often use moral dilemmas based on the now famous philosophical thought experiments involving runaway trolleys
- A number of studies have suggested that judgments rejecting such sacrifices are based in more emotional processing than judgments endorsing them. More disturbingly, "utilitarian" judgments were found to be associated with anti-social traits such as psychopathy — both at a sub-clinical and clinical level. This result has led one major newspaper to conclude that "goodness has nothing to do" with utilitarianism, and that "utilitarians are not nice people".
- such a tie between utilitarianism and antisocial traits is more than a little surprising when one considers the historical origins and influence of utilitarianism. Developed in 18th century Britain, utilitarianism is a philosophical theory grounded in the core idea that we should always act in the way that would impartially maximize the well-being of everyone on the planet, whether friend or stranger, near or far, human or animal.
- Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Peter Singer have played a critical role in "expanding the moral circle" and making morality more inclusive by fighting against sexism, racism, and "speciesism", passionately arguing for political and sexual liberty, and making influential efforts to eradicate poverty in developing countries
- traditional utilitarianism vs. effective alturism
- impartial beneficence, reflects the extent to which individuals endorse the impartial promotion of everyone's welfare without regard to distance or personal ties. The second, instrumental harm, reflects the extent to which people regard harm to innocent people as a morally acceptable means to achieving a greater good
- while psychopaths may be more willing to push someone off a footbridge to save five others, it would be surprising if these same psychopaths signed up to join an Effective Altruism Club or showed care for the plight of strangers in the developing world.
- the sacrificial dilemmas paradigm ignores or downplays the positive, impartial and altruistic core of a utilitarian approach to ethics
- They show that these two dimensions of utilitarianism — impartial beneficence and instrumental harm — are not merely distinct theoretically, but also are separate dimensions of moral cognition, each exhibiting a distinctive psychological profile
- empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and while instrumental harm was associated with sub-clinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity.
Citation:
Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2018). Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology. Psychological Review, 125(2), 131–164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000093
Very complete notes. You know how these will be beneficial later!
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