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Power Femme
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tapu
Ugh. Under utilitarianism (in the shorthand way I know it), the second scenario is better. It just comes down to math: One more person is left living--the pilot.
Well, now, that's not very attractive as moral principles go.
I think the using/letting-leave/instrument/agent/passive etc approaches are proving richer for thinking about the ethics. Of course, with that come the uncomfortable complications
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This is why utilitarianism is of only very limited usefulness unless it is tempered by something like a Kantian imperative such as "human beings are ends to themselves". Without that we wind up exactly where you state--whatever will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number is the correct action. However, if we insert the Kantian imperative then we can say:
Provided that it does not use people as a means to an end and all other things being equal, we should probably consider those actions that bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number the action most likely to be correct.
I would say that this is a more useful formulation of what Bentham and Mills were on about.
Cheers
Aj
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"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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