Ethics: Utilitarianism part 3발음듣기
Ethics: Utilitarianism part 3
One feature of utilitarianism that the Jones example brings out is that utilitarianism is interested only in the total amount of good our actions produce, not in how that good is distributed across different people.발음듣기
That's why the brief frustration of billions of soccer fans can together add up to more disvalue than the intense pain of one person.발음듣기
According to utilitarianism, the distribution of value across different people matters only to the extent that it affects the total amount of value our actions produce.발음듣기
Nozick asked us to imagine a creature he called a "utility monster": someone who is extremely good, much better than the rest of us, at converting resources into happiness.발음듣기
And however happy some resources could make a normal person, those same resources would make him, the utility monster, much happier still.발음듣기
Utilitarianism seems to imply that all the ordinary people should be sacrificed for the sake of the utility monster, since that is what would make for the most happiness on the whole.발음듣기
The more resources we already have, the less impact some additional resource will have on our happiness.발음듣기
Think of how much bigger an impact one hundred dollars might have on your well-being than on the well-being of Bill Gates, and how much bigger an impact still a hundred dollars might have on the well-being of a child in a developing nation, whose life it could save, than it has on yours.발음듣기
Even if each of us exhibits diminishing marginal utility of wealth, if in other words one hundred dollars would benefit me more when I'm poor than when I'm rich, might some of us be utility monsters with respect to others?발음듣기
Some of us, after all, might be much better at converting resources into well-being than others, even if we have more well-being to begin with.발음듣기
For example, the elderly, the disabled, or those suffering from expensive-to-treat diseases might require a lot of resources to produce a small increase in their well-being, even though they are already comparatively badly off.발음듣기
It may say it's okay to do things, like leaving Jones to suffer or sacrificing people to the utility monster, that we feel intuitively it's morally wrong to do.발음듣기