Well, nothing in the definition of consequential ethics requires us to be looking exclusively at expected life years or pleasure or pain. It’s possible to imagine one where you’re summing over feelings of violated boundaries or something, in which case the fact that you’ve killed the guy directly becomes overwhelmingly important and the trolley problem would straightforwardly favor “do not push”. It’s just that most consequential ethics don’t, so it isn’t; in other words this feature emerges from the utility function, not the metaethical scheme.
(As an aside, it seems to me that preference utilitarianism—which I don’t entirely endorse, but which seems to be the least wrong of the common utilitarianisms—would in many cases weight the fat man’s life more heavily than that of a random bystander; many people, given the choice, would rather die by accident than through violence. It wouldn’t likely be enough to change the outcome in the standard 1:5 case, but it would be enough to make us prefer doing nothing in a hypothetical 1:1 case, rather than being indifferent as per total utilitarianism. Which matches my intuition.)
That was one example in a very large space of possibilities; you can differentiate the consequences of actions in any way you please, as long as you’re doing so in a well-behaved way. You don’t even need to be using a sum—average utilitarianism doesn’t.
This does carry a couple of caveats, of course. Some methods give much less pathological results than others, and some are much less well studied.
Summing over actual violated boundaries is also a possible consequentialism, but it does not seem to capture the intuitions of those deontological theories which disallow you to push the fat guy. Suppose the driver of the trolley is a mustache-twirling villain who has tied the other five people to the tracks deliberately to run the trolley over them (thus violating their boundaries). Deontologists would say this makes little difference for your choice in the dilemma, you are still not permitted to throw the fat man on the tracks to save them. This deontological rule cannot be mimicked with a consequentialism that assigns high negative value to boundary-violations regardless of agent. It can, perhaps, (I am not entirely sure) be mimicked with a consequentialism that assigns high negative value to the subjective feeling of violating a boundary yourself.
Well, nothing in the definition of consequential ethics requires us to be looking exclusively at expected life years or pleasure or pain. It’s possible to imagine one where you’re summing over feelings of violated boundaries or something, in which case the fact that you’ve killed the guy directly becomes overwhelmingly important and the trolley problem would straightforwardly favor “do not push”. It’s just that most consequential ethics don’t, so it isn’t; in other words this feature emerges from the utility function, not the metaethical scheme.
(As an aside, it seems to me that preference utilitarianism—which I don’t entirely endorse, but which seems to be the least wrong of the common utilitarianisms—would in many cases weight the fat man’s life more heavily than that of a random bystander; many people, given the choice, would rather die by accident than through violence. It wouldn’t likely be enough to change the outcome in the standard 1:5 case, but it would be enough to make us prefer doing nothing in a hypothetical 1:1 case, rather than being indifferent as per total utilitarianism. Which matches my intuition.)
So you’re willing to allow summing over feelings of violated boundaries, but not summing over actual violated boundaries, interesting.
That was one example in a very large space of possibilities; you can differentiate the consequences of actions in any way you please, as long as you’re doing so in a well-behaved way. You don’t even need to be using a sum—average utilitarianism doesn’t.
This does carry a couple of caveats, of course. Some methods give much less pathological results than others, and some are much less well studied.
Summing over actual violated boundaries is also a possible consequentialism, but it does not seem to capture the intuitions of those deontological theories which disallow you to push the fat guy. Suppose the driver of the trolley is a mustache-twirling villain who has tied the other five people to the tracks deliberately to run the trolley over them (thus violating their boundaries). Deontologists would say this makes little difference for your choice in the dilemma, you are still not permitted to throw the fat man on the tracks to save them. This deontological rule cannot be mimicked with a consequentialism that assigns high negative value to boundary-violations regardless of agent. It can, perhaps, (I am not entirely sure) be mimicked with a consequentialism that assigns high negative value to the subjective feeling of violating a boundary yourself.