If we ask as to why people seek further data on the topic, it isn’t to save lives or stop the killing, it is still to provide the most ‘good’ for the majority since keeping a healthy killer on the lifeboat and sacrificing an unhealthy scientist won’t actually provide the most benefit to society. If you think about it, that argument is still a utilitarian approach. To go to the argument against utilitarianism, that is the lack of data. But then what if we said that the Joker mostly kills criminals with some innocent casualties? The choice becomes a bit harder, doesn’t it? For a lot of people, killing someone even as sinister as Joker is questionable, but what if the Joker had killed your parents? For many, that makes the decision much easier. Rule utilitarianism would make it a rule to kill the person that kills multiple, and act utilitarians would say that it is the best course of action.īut the problem, in the second point still remains. But a utilitarian would say that killing Joker would actually be ethically right because it would stop Joker from killing others, which does the most good for the majority. Not to mention it is still illegal even if you have a billion-dollar suit and look cool while doing it. He is against it and it goes against his morality. Now, if you haven’t seen the movies or read the comics, Batman doesn’t kill. These state that rules should be made with the intention of doing the most ‘good’ for the majority and actions that do the most ‘good’ for the majority aren’t wrong.Ī commonly famous example used to conceptualize these ideas is Batman and Joker.Īt this point, you should see a theme within my choice of examples and pictures And the question that gets asked is: should Batman kill Joker? The argument for utilitarianism is that it logically makes sense that doing what is good for the majority will lead to the highest chances of survival these lead to two sub-categories of utilitarianism which are rule-utilitarianism and act-utilitarianism. If you don’t believe me, just ask Charles Darwin. Now, I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but I wasn’t one of them.īut you can’t even blame them for morally feeling this way, a sense of self-preservation is engraved into us genetically through evolution. This was why many of my friends put their hands down when the second question was asked. The greater good goes out the window when they are the ones to pay the cost. The hedonistic utilitarians are the ones who are all for the greater good as long as they are in the ‘greater’ for whom its good.
It is a very selfish way of living but for some people, it is a cultural dynamic they’ve grown up in where their goal is to do whatever is best for them. For those who don’t know what Hedonism is, it’s basically where it any action that is the best for you is the morally right one. The most common adaptation of Utilitarianism is a very Hedonistic one. And this leads me to the article: Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, even when ‘the few’ include you? And now that we have our question, The number of hands significantly dropped, due to either uncertainty or simply self-preservation.
Then our teacher proposed another question, what if you were one of those 7? Having established these two things, my class broke off into a pseudo-chaotic debate and the majority of the class raised their hand and voted to sacrifice the 7. For all you know, there could be a healthy murderer who would be chosen to live on and an unhealthy innocent would have to die. However, this “argument” is actually a longer route to the same utilitarian morale and I’ll get to that later.īut, we do have to ask who exactly those people are and know a little more about themselves. It is unknown as to who those 14 other people are as of now. And this is usually the argument against justifying the murder of the 8 people. Secondly, there is this inadvertent lack of data. We ought to act always as to produce the greatest good for the greatest possible number. According to this, people make choices and act based on what is good for the majority of the collective, even if it is at the cost of the minority. Firstly, this way of thinking is known as utilitarianism.
If you don’t know who this is, you really need to free up your schedule and watch the original Star Trek movies But does it?īefore we answer that or at least attempt to, we have to identify some things.
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