the lecture that we were engaged with last week about

utilitarianism and then to move on to what is perhaps the

most dead-guy-on-Tuesday lecture of the semester, that

is, an explanation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

So in order to make up for the fact that the second part of

the lecture is fairly dry, we'll have a couple of clicker

questions in the first part of the lecture.

OK, so as you recall from our lecture last class, John

Stuart Mill, in the selections from Utilitarianism that we

read, says two extraordinarily famous things that serve in

some ways as the heart of the utilitarian view.

The first thing that he says is that he articulates what's

known as the greatest happiness principle.

This is a principle that's supposed to tell you what it

is for an act to be morally right.

And what Mill says is, there's a proportionality between the

rightness of the act and something that it produces.

In particular, a proportionality between the

rightness of the act and the amount of happiness it

produces, regardless of how that happiness is distributed.

In particular he says "actions are right in proportion as

they tend to promote happiness, they're wrong as

they tend to promote the reverse of happiness," and the

happiness with which we're concerned is not the agent's

own happiness but "the happiness of all concerned."

The second extraordinarily famous saying that he says in

the opening passages of Utilitarianism is that the

motive with which an act is performed is irrelevant to the

act's moral worth.

He says the motive has nothing to do with the

morality of the action.

"He who saves another creature from drowning does what is

morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of

being paid for it."

So we might summarize what these principles say, as

saying that the first one tells us that what matters for

the morality of an act is the aggregate amount of happiness

that it produces.

And what we're concerned with here are aggregates, not

individuals.

We're interested in how much good is done overall, not

where those pieces of good might happen to fall.

And what the second principle tells us is that what the

utilitarian, who is after all a consequentialist, is

concerned with are consequences.

They're interested in the outcome of the act, not the

process by which that outcome was achieved.

So the first reading that we did for last class was a

selection from Mill's Utilitarianism where he

articulated these principles.

And it's important to recognize that these get

something profoundly right about what we're thinking

about, I think, when we try to articulate what lies behind

our moral judgment.

It does seem right that what we're interested in is what

the world is like after a particular action is taken,

and to the extent that we're interested in what the world

is like, our primary interest is not in how that state of

affairs came about, but what that state of affairs is.

And our primary concern, if we're taking a moral stance,

is not in how much we ourselves have, but rather in

how much good there is in the world overall.

That said, there have been, since utilitarianism was

articulated, a classic set of objections which are raised to

the view, some of which we'll talk more about today, and

some of which we encountered in the selection from Bernard

Williams that we read last class.

Now you will all recall that Williams' discussion begins

with a story of a gentleman that he calls Jim, who finds

himself in a South American village that's run by a rather

unsavory cowboy.

And some of the citizens of that village have been

protesting the unsavory cowboy's leadership.

And so what the unsavory cowboy has done is he has

rounded up twenty of those villagers, and he's

planning--simply to show the others that he's in charge--to

kill those twenty villagers.

When Jim arrives, Pedro the cowboy tells him that, if Jim

is willing to shoot one of the villagers, the other nineteen

will be set free.

So that's the Jim case.

Jim shows up in a town.

The sheriff of the town has selected twenty people at

random to be shot, but if Jim is willing to kill one of them

the other 19 will be set free, so--

clickers out--

Question: In the Jim case, what is Jim

morally obliged to do?

Is the moral thing for Jim to do in this case to shoot the

one man, thereby liberating the other nineteen, or is the

right thing for him to do to refuse to shoot the one,

thereby letting all twenty die?

OK, so let's see how the numbers came out.

So almost 3/4 of you, actually more than 3/4 of you, think

that what the morally right thing for Jim to do in this

case is to shoot one man, thereby

liberating the other nineteen.

We'll have a chance next week to talk a lot in about these

sorts of questions.

Our reading for Thursday is a series of moral dilemmas with

this structure.

But what I want to ask those 77% of you, who answered

"yes," to do now is to think about whether you take what

Williams says is the natural utilitarian next step.

Williams argues that if you are a committed utilitarian,

and you think that the morally right thing for Jim to do is

to shoot the one and release the other nineteen, then you

ought to feel no moral compunction about doing so.

There's a clear right thing to do.

The right thing is to kill the one, so

it's to save the nineteen.

You may feel moral disapprobation--indeed you

should feel moral disapprobation--towards Pedro

who put Jim in this situation.

But you ought to feel no moral disapprobation towards Jim,

and even more importantly according to Williams, Jim

himself ought to feel no moral compunction.

So among the 77% of you who answered that Jim did the

right thing in killing the one and saving the nineteen, do

you think that in shooting the one man, Jim ought to think of

any hesitation that he feels as mere squeamishness,

something that ought to be overcome?

Or do you think that Jim ought to think of the hesitation

that he feels in doing what the utilitarian and in what

you yourself said was the right thing, do you think he

ought to think of his hesitation as being indicative

of something morally relevant?

So there's roughly seventy of you who should

be answering this.

Let's see how the numbers come out.

OK, so most of you take on only part of the

consequentialist picture here, at least in the way that

Williams understands it.

Most of you think that, although the right thing for

Jim to do in that case is to kill the one to save the

nineteen, it's not the case that he ought wholeheartedly

to endorse that as the right thing to do.

In a minute, I'm going to present to you Williams'

analogy to the case of residual racism to try to help

you see why someone who really has taken on board the

consequentialist outlook thinks that the combination of

views which most of you present, where you think the

right thing to do is to kill the one to save the nineteen,

but you also think the right thing to do is to feel bad

about that in some way, have not fully appreciated what the

utilitarian stance provides you with as a way of

understanding morality.

So Williams, as you know, presents us with two cases.

The first is the case that I've just given you, the case

of Jim and the captive Indians.

The second is the case in high '70's fashion of a man who is

needing to go back to work because it's difficult to have

his wife working outside of the home.

I leave that to you as a period piece.

But the work which George is provided in Williams' example

is work in a bioweapons lab, something to which George

feels moral opposition.

But if George doesn't take the job in the bioweapons lab a

much more gung-ho person, somebody who's likely to

advocate the use of bioweapons in all sorts of contexts, will

get the job instead.

So the two cases that Williams presents us with there have a

common structure.

And a common structure which we're going to see again and

again in moral dilemmas.

There's one act that the person can do that leads to a

particular outcome, another act that the person can do

that leads to a different outcome, where the first act

is worse on its surface than the second.

So Jim has the possibility of shooting one person, or

shooting no people.

Those are the choices that Jim faces.

If Jim does the first act, shooting one person, then

nineteen people will go free; if Jim does the second act,

which is not to shoot anybody at all, to refuse Pedro's

bargain, then all twenty people will be shot.

Likewise, George faces a choice between doing one

thing, taking the job in--

sorry, George faces the choice between taking the job in the

bio lab and not taking the job in the bio lab.

If George takes the job in the bio lab, then the gung-ho

biological weapons fellow won't [will]

get the job, and the outcome will be better [worse].

If George doesn't take the job, then the gung-ho

biological weapons person won't get the job and the

outcome will be better.

So, in both cases we have an act killing the one versus

killing none, taking the job versus not taking the job,

which is worse than another, but the outcomes of those acts

are inverted.

The consequentialist tells us not to look at the act side of

the equation, but to look at the

outcome side of the equation.

The only things, says the consequentialist, that we need

to take into consideration, is how many people are saved or

how much bio-weapons research is done.

According to the consequentialist, what we do

is we look and we see, outcome one is better than outcome

two, and then reading back from that, we decide which

thing we ought to do.

We ought to do act one because it's the thing that produces

the better outcome.

The deontologist or virtue ethicist says, not so fast.

Don't jump straight to the consequence, look also at what

it is that is needed to be done by the individual to

bring about that consequence.

And recognizing that act one is worse than act two, the

deontologist or virtue ethicist says, it's at least

important to take seriously as a possibility that the right

thing to do in this situation is the second act, even if the

outcome that it leads to is worse.

Now what Williams points out is that if one takes seriously

the first of these stances, the one where what we're

looking at is the outcome and not the process which gave

rise to that outcome, then any hesitation we feel towards

bringing about that outcome as the result of that particular

act is due to what we might call a certain kind of

squeamishness.

The utilitarian says, and we started with the quotes from

Mill for this reason, that thinking about who does an act

is morally irrelevant, just as thinking about who gets the

goods is morally irrelevant.

What matters, says the greatest happiness principle,

is how much aggregate happiness is produced; what

matters not, except in so far as it affects the amount of

happiness, is who produces that happiness or where that

happiness goes.

So there is room on the consequentialist picture for