Topics Ethics

Question Some friends and I were having one of those classic hypothetical discussions: Suppose a scenario existed in which, by killing 10 million innocent people, you could save the lives of everyone else on earth. I said no. You don't kill the 10 million innocents. To my surprise, everyone else in the group was incredulous. They didn't think the point was even debatable. Of course you kill the 10 million to save billions. Greater good and all that. I argued that when you intentionally do unjust harm to innocents in order to be able to offer that good, then absolutely, yes, that is a horrendous thing. "By your standard," I said, "you could wipe out 49.99999% of the world's population, raising the standard of living for the other 50.00001%, and call yourself a goddamn hero." They still weren't convinced. I feel sure I'm right, but don't have the skills to explain to my friends why. Can you help? Or . . . explain to me why I'm wrong?

Accepted:
December 20, 2007

Comments

You seem to have encountered a problem my friend and mentor, John Marshall, once described as follows: "There is a sense in which utilitarians and Kantians pass in the dark in the way in which representatives of different cultures are said by moral relativists to do.What is more, utilitarians and Kantians will not even agree at a deep level about what at a more superficial level belongs to the core content of morality. Murder is wrong, they both say, but they do not mean exactly the same thing."

Normative moral theories, like utilitarianism and deontology (of which Kantianism is perhaps the most popular, at least in philosophical circles), often operate on radically different conceptions of what makes something morally right. For utilitarians, like your friends, whatever action achieves a result adding up to a better outcome overall is, by definition, the morally right thing to do. For a deontologist, moral rightness is determined by duty, regardless of consequences. (Obviously, I'm simplifying a great deal; you might refer to the Stanford Encyclopedia's entries on both of these theories to get a more precise view of the difference.) It sounds as though you tend more toward deontology, and take "Never intentionally harm innocent people" (or some variation) to be a principle of duty.

Unless you can convince your friends that duty is a better measure of moral goodness than consequences (i.e., convert them from utilitarianism to deontology), you're likely to find continued argument frustrating. A more promising approach might be to show that the intentional killing they endorse would, in fact, result in a worse outcome overall -- for example, by instilling pervasive fear in the remaining population that they, too, could be randomly and wantonly killed in the interest of the "greater good." In fact, you could argue that the greater good is served by adopting "Never intentionally harm innocent people" as a rule. Utilitarians who are amenable to pursuing the greater good by means of adopting rules that, if followed, would lead to the greater good overall, are called "rule utilitarians," and are frequently able to converse with deontologists with minimal frustration...even though, when you get to the reasoning behind the rules, they still do not mean exactly the same thing.