Consider a saintly utlitarian, who believes that it is always morally right to do whatever will have the best effects for everybody concerned, on average, in the long run. He knows that, in general, the best way for him to make people’s lives better is to devote all his energy into helping the poorest of the world’s poor. One very important way he does this is to try to get high-paying jobs and then donate the money to charity. Given his talents and life history before reaching his current state of utilitarian saintliness, the best job he can get is as a professor of philosophy at a prestigeous university, and as a writer of philosophy books (which sell very well). Since he has considerable of flexibility in where he focuses his philosophical interests, he focuses his books, articles, and lectures on exhorting people to live out the utilitarian ideal of morality in various ways, including by spending much of their time caring for the world’s poor.
Based on what he knows of his society, he concludes that he will be taken more seriously, and therefore be able to earn more money and influence more people to live morally, if he dresses respectably. Part of what this means is wearing $200 dress shoes to lectures and other public functions. He justifiably believes that such shoes will improve his ability to be taken seriously enough that spending the money on shoes, rather than donating it directly to charity, will have the best effects for everyone concerned, but spening more on shoes would not have the best effects for everyone concerned.
One day, while going to give a lecture, he happens upon a child drowning in a shallow pond. He knows that he could easily wade into the pond and save the child, and his socks and pants would be fine after no more than an ordinary washing that he was going to have to do anyway. The shoes, however, would be ruined, and he justifiably believes that replacing the shoes with equally expensive ones, as opposed to wearing old ones or buying cheaper replacements, would have the best effects for everyone concerned. However, he knows that it would mean donating $200 less to help the poorest of the world’s poor, and in the poorest areas of the world a child’s life can be saved for $100 at the very most. Therefore, he realizes that wading into the pond would mean sacrificing at least two lives somewhere else in the world, so he walks on, and the drowning child dies.
Did he do something morally wrong? I have a moral intuition that he did, though perhaps a somewhat weak one. I think others will have even stronger moral intuitions that he did something wrong. And if these moral intuitions are correct, utilitarianism is false.
Discuss.
*Note: if this post is confusing to you, start by reading this, and then do some Googling.
Assuming perfect knowledge of the consequences, I would have to say that it would be right to let the child die. The problem with this particular thought experiment is that that there are so many ways where the utilitarian saint could be wrong about the consequences of his actions if the inescapable human uncertainty applied. For example, it could become known that he let the child die, and in the best case, he would not be able to fundraise anymore, and int he worst case, would be arrested for negligent homicide; maybe his shoes, as it turns out, are waterproof after all; maybe the child’s parents will offer a reward in excess of the value of the shoes; maybe he can use his ruined shoes as an emblem of what he did, and through it inspire other people to give money to his cause. Or maybe it turns out the charity is embezzling funds and hiding it very well.
The point is, this isn’t the train problem, where the causal chain is perfectly clear, and the final outcome depends on few variables. If you reformulate the thought experiment so that the causal chain to saving the two children is more direct and depends on fewer variables, I suspect your intuition will change to something closer to that of the train problem.
Your ethical posturings are arbritrary.
I accept none of it.
Nietzsche, the Syphillitic Atheist, showed us THE WAY!
“Elimination of the weak and defective, the first principle of our philosophy! And we should help them to do it!”
From, The Anti Christ, sec. 2
And, of course, the fool could have taken the fucking shoes off!
Clever reversal of the example, but I doubt this one would be too convincing to a serious utilitarian. For one, Peter Singer at least seems to love biting these kind of bullets (see e.g. his past arguments on doing medical experiments on severely-retarded humans). More broadly, I think there are a host of ways one’s intuitions here could be infected by extraneous factors, which in turn would enable their value to be dismissed by a committed utilitarian. There’s the greater immediacy and vividness of the pond baby’s death as compared to the charity babies, our inability to really imagine a middle-to-upper class person whose personal budget was so tightly optimized that buying new shoes would force them to sacrifice two lives’ worth of charity, and the uncertainty Caio mentions about all the causal connections (which is easier to stipulate away than to truly take on board intuitively). And then there’s the value of this incident as a real-life illustration of Singer’s heretofore hypothetical argument for giving to charity!