RE: Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds
May 20, 2021 at 6:52 pm
(This post was last modified: May 20, 2021 at 7:02 pm by vulcanlogician.)
(May 20, 2021 at 5:06 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Plenty of utilitarian goods allow or are explicitly produced by some harm. If it were true that slavery benefited a majority, or that slavery benefitted a majority of the enslaved, it would satisfy the criteria of utilitarianism by definition.
Not necessarily. A utilitarian aims for a world that is maximally good. If hedonism is your principle... that means "the happiness of the majority" is not the central focus. The depth of suffering and the amount of suffering an individual experiences counts for something.
For instance, if there were two identical worlds, except in one world, two people paid full price for movie tickets. But in the nearly identical world, these two saved a dollar off their movie tickets-- but somebody lost an arm. The first world is better.
I think "benefitting the majority" is a side effect of utilitarianism and not its primary goal.
And I also want to say that, even if it could be demonstrated that hedonistic utilitarianism requires abolition of slavery, I would still find the theory dissatisfying and incomplete. I'm not trying to "save utilitarianism" or anything. I just think that (in principle) abolition may be necessary for a maximally good world.
