Does Anyone Take Utilitarianism Seriously?
Utilitarianism is a popular approach to normative ethics. The philosophy behind it can be described as performing the action that does the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But despite its popularity and relative longevity, I don't think anyone believes it. Let's look at some examples.
The most obvious case to me is in medical research. Think of how many times Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who survived an iron rod going through his skull and destroying much of his brain, has been cited in academic research. He's nothing short of a celebrity in the world of neurology. But what happened to him was the result of an accident over 100 years ago and he's still considered a fascinating medical case today, the subject of books and books and more books.
To this day, we're still learning a lot from Gage. There are still articles being published in Science about what we can learn from his unfortunate situation. Malcolm Macmillan, the author of another Gage book, "An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage", said:
He was the first case where you could say fairly definitely that injury to the brain produced some kind of change in personality.
Here's another case of something similar happening to a construction worker. Just scanning through Google Scholar, you find so many examples of these. But what if neurologists didn't have to wait for these examples to walk in the door? What if they could create them, and not just one - 100 to get a nice statistical sample. Even if we did everything to minimize the suffering, these people would still suffer. But how much could we learn? And how much closer would that bring us to curing diseases that affect millions of people a year? The scale is wildly flipped towards more good coming out of this than bad.
This is a horrible idea. I'm not in favor of removing bits of people's brains just because it would be really interesting to see what would happen, and the knowledge gained would benefit other people. I'm not for this at all. I don't know anyone who is. But that's because no one takes utilitarianism seriously.
Think of all the medical knowledge we could gain from unethical studies. I'm not saying we should do these experiments. But I am saying, if we really take utilitarianism seriously, how could we not?
We could take this further. I have a liver, bladder, heart, pancreas, two kidneys, and much more. All of that is only going to preserve one life. But if the pieces were divided up to those who needed each the most, they could save more lives. Yes, I'm talking about forced organ donation that results in death. Is it a good idea? No. But is it consistent with utilitarianism? It seems to me that if you really take the idea seriously, it is.
I can't see how anyone in the rich world could justify spending any money on themselves when a dollar goes so much further in poor countries. But I see people doing this all the time (including myself). Again, I don't think it's wrong to do so, but it seems counter to utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is an interesting idea, but it's not how humans work.