This runs square into the fundamental Utilitarian problem that moral valuation of individuals is nontrivial and nonlinear. In most of our intuitions, it’s also personal—I value my grandma more than I value yours. For any reasonable objective measure of aggregate utility, it’s absolutely right to distribute grandma’s resources more usefully (whether you kill her or just keep her barely alive is a related but separate question). And it’s right to distribute YOUR resources more evenly, if you believe in declining marginal utility and individual equality of utility-weight.
You need to bite one of two bullets: either your intuitions are very wrong about grandma, and you should kill her, or your intuitions are very wrong about the relative moral weight of your family compared to distant strangers.
This becomes even more clear if you specify that the beneficiaries of the money you’ll steal from grandma is going to OTHER grandmas, who are near-starvation. If you don’t have a theory for why THIS grandma is more valuable than the others, then you don’t have a consistent moral system.
I suspect most people that would say that they wouldn’t kill Grandma would also say the same about a situation where they can kill someone else’s grandma to give the money to their own family. Actually, in the hypothetical, you’re not one of Grandma’s heirs, so I interpreted it as if you’re some random person who happens to be around Grandma, not one of her actual grandchildren.
So really, I think that it is either something like “the moral weight of the person next to me versus distant strangers” or “choosing to kill someone is fundamentally different than choosing to save someone’s life and you can’t add them up”.
This runs square into the fundamental Utilitarian problem that moral valuation of individuals is nontrivial and nonlinear. In most of our intuitions, it’s also personal—I value my grandma more than I value yours. For any reasonable objective measure of aggregate utility, it’s absolutely right to distribute grandma’s resources more usefully (whether you kill her or just keep her barely alive is a related but separate question). And it’s right to distribute YOUR resources more evenly, if you believe in declining marginal utility and individual equality of utility-weight.
You need to bite one of two bullets: either your intuitions are very wrong about grandma, and you should kill her, or your intuitions are very wrong about the relative moral weight of your family compared to distant strangers.
This becomes even more clear if you specify that the beneficiaries of the money you’ll steal from grandma is going to OTHER grandmas, who are near-starvation. If you don’t have a theory for why THIS grandma is more valuable than the others, then you don’t have a consistent moral system.
I suspect most people that would say that they wouldn’t kill Grandma would also say the same about a situation where they can kill someone else’s grandma to give the money to their own family. Actually, in the hypothetical, you’re not one of Grandma’s heirs, so I interpreted it as if you’re some random person who happens to be around Grandma, not one of her actual grandchildren.
So really, I think that it is either something like “the moral weight of the person next to me versus distant strangers” or “choosing to kill someone is fundamentally different than choosing to save someone’s life and you can’t add them up”.