Ethics Discussion Project:
Applying Act Utilitarianism
Each group will be assigned one of the “Cases for Discussion.” Today, examine your case from the point of view of ‘act-utilitarianism’. That is:
1. List what you think are the two or three most
plausible options for action in this situation.
2. Make a list of the people or groups of people
who are affected by this decision. (See note 1 below.)
3. For each person (or group) and for each
possible action, try to decide how well (or how badly) that person or group
would fare. What effect would each
possible action have on that person’s happiness? Try to actually assign a quantitative
estimate of this. Remember to take into
account:
a.
How many people are in the group you are considering (if it is more than
one)
b.
How much each person (or the average group member) will be affected
c. If there is some significant degree of
uncertainty about how things will go, then estimate the probability of the
different outcomes, and adjust your figures accordingly. (See note 2 below.)
Make
assumptions (about how many people are in each group and so on) as necessary to
keep moving forward. Use your common
sense to try to keep your assumptions plausible.
4. Add up the numbers to determine which action
best promotes ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.
5. Discuss whether this procedure seems to be a
sensible one for determining what it is right to do.
6.
In the circumstances of your case, does it seem reasonable to you to demand, as
utilitarianism does, that a person trying to decide what course of action is
best should give no greater weight to his or her own interests than to the
interests of anyone else who is affected by the decision? That is, does the utilitarian insistence on
counting everyone's interests equally seem reasonable in your case?
Notes:
1. Ideally we would like to consider the impact
of our actions on every individual who is affected. In practice a utilitarian analysis will often
need to lump people together into groups and consider the average effect on
members of each group. Depending on the
nature of the case, these might be groups like ‘employees’, ‘customers’,
‘stockholders’, ‘taxpayers’, ‘patients’, ‘members of x’s family’, ‘residents of
the neighborhood’ ‘people offended by behavior y’, “people who would benefit
from engaging in behavior y’, etc. Once
we have lumped people together this way we need an estimate of the average
cost or benefit (in utility, not dollars) for the members of a group. Then we multiply that number by the number of
group members.
2. When outcomes are uncertain we need a more
complex analysis. We need to estimate
the likelihood or probability of an outcome and then discount the expected
utility of that outcome accordingly. Suppose,
for example, we have a blind patient and the options are ‘do nothing’ and
‘perform surgery’. Suppose further that
there is a 90% chance that the surgery will be successful and the patient will
regain his sight, but that there is a 10% chance that the patient will
die. Then we have the following:
Benefits = .9 times (value of eyesight).
Costs = cost of surgery + .1 times (value of patient’s life). (Yes, utilitarians have to figure out how to
put a numerical value on things like eyesight and life.)