Utilitarianism is not supposed to be applied like this. It is only a perspective. If you apply it everywhere, then there’s a much quicker shortcut: we should kill a healthy person and use this person’s organs to save several other people who would otherwise be healthy if not for some organ disfunction.
Lives are in general not comparable by amount, especially human lives, for a society to function. Which is why the person who pulls the handle in the trolly problem commits a crime.
This is where intuition can go wrong. If intuitions are not necessarily consistent, since most people avoid the trolley problem at all cost, then no wonder ethics built to be based on intuition is futile.
Utilitarianism is not supposed to be applied like this. It is only a perspective. If you apply it everywhere, then there’s a much quicker shortcut: we should kill a healthy person and use this person’s organs to save several other people who would otherwise be healthy if not for some organ disfunction.
And Peter Singer would say yes, yes we should. But only in secret, because of the bad effects there would be if people knew they might be chopped for spares. (Which rather contradicts Singer’s willingness to publish that paper, but you’d have to ask Singer about that.)
Is there some Internet Law that says that however extreme the reductio, there is someone who will bite the bullet?
Utilitarianism is not supposed to be applied like this. It is only a perspective. If you apply it everywhere, then there’s a much quicker shortcut: we should kill a healthy person and use this person’s organs to save several other people who would otherwise be healthy if not for some organ disfunction.
Lives are in general not comparable by amount, especially human lives, for a society to function. Which is why the person who pulls the handle in the trolly problem commits a crime.
This is where intuition can go wrong. If intuitions are not necessarily consistent, since most people avoid the trolley problem at all cost, then no wonder ethics built to be based on intuition is futile.
And Peter Singer would say yes, yes we should. But only in secret, because of the bad effects there would be if people knew they might be chopped for spares. (Which rather contradicts Singer’s willingness to publish that paper, but you’d have to ask Singer about that.)
Is there some Internet Law that says that however extreme the reductio, there is someone who will bite the bullet?