Lecture 3
Utilitarianism: An Introduction
William Sin
September, 2009.
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What things are good?
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Which things are bad?
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Note the Difference between Intrinsic and
Instrumental Goodness
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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.
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Utilitarianism is about …
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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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.
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(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.
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Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility
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(2) Fairness & Pareto Optimality
• Can we tell the difference between acceptable
acts of maximization and problematic one?
Pareto Optimality
Unfair Distribution
A1: {10, 10, 10, 10} TU = 40
A1: {10, 10, 10, 10} TU = 40
A2: {11, 12, 12, 13} TU = 48
A3: {2, 2, 25, 25} TU = 54
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The Transplant Problem
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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.
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If killing is morally worse than letting die, why
is it morally permissible for an agent to
choose to throw the switch in TROLLEY?