Ethics Discussion Project: Applying Act Utilitarianism

Each group will return to the same case they considered last time. This week we will examine your case from the point of view of act utilitarianism Proceed as follows:

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.)

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 quantitative value on things like eyesight and life.)