The Greatest Good: Consequences — Ethics 2 (C1)

ETHICS · LESSON 2

The Greatest Good: Consequences

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Five lives or one

Task Write P, N or D for each case. For every D, write one line on what it depends on.

P = permissible · N = not permissible · D = it depends

1. The switch. A runaway trolley is heading for five workers on the track ahead. You are standing by a lever. If you pull it, the trolley turns onto a side track and kills one worker instead.

2. The footbridge. You are on a bridge above the track. The only way to stop the trolley is to push a very large stranger off the bridge into its path. He will die; the five will live.

3. The surgeon. A surgeon has five patients who will die without organ transplants. A healthy visitor, Tomas, is a perfect match for all five. She could kill him painlessly and save them.

4. The loop. As in the switch case, but the side track loops back to rejoin the main track just before the five. The one worker's body is what will stop the trolley: if he were not there, it would go round and kill the five anyway.

READING

Two sovereign masters

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure." So opens Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed 1780, published 1789). His principle of utility judges every action, and every law, by its tendency to increase or reduce the happiness of all those it affects. In A Fragment on Government (1776) he had already called it a fundamental axiom that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.

This is the module's first lens,

Consequences, and its question is "What will happen?". A theory that judges acts by their results alone is called consequentialism, a name coined in 1958 by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who meant it as a criticism. Utilitarianism is its best-known form: the results that count are happiness and suffering, and everyone counts the same. Mill later quoted the rule as "Bentham's dictum": "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one".

Bentham wanted ethics to be as exact as a science.

READING · CONTINUED

Two sovereign masters

He listed seven dimensions for measuring a pleasure or a pain: its intensity, its duration, its certainty, its propinquity (how soon it comes), its fecundity (the chance it leads to more of the same), its purity (the chance it is not followed by the opposite) and its

extent (how many people it reaches). Later writers called this method the felicific calculus; the name is not Bentham's. Its sharp edge was political: a law is good not because it is ancient or the king's will, but only if it makes lives go better.

Consequences

Duty

Character

Relationships

What will happen?

What rule applies?

What would a good person do?

Who am I to them?

READING

Pigs and Socrates

John Stuart Mill was raised to be a utilitarian: his father, James Mill, was one of Bentham's closest allies. In Utilitarianism, published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863, Mill stated the creed in one line: actions are "right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."

Critics had attacked the theory as "a doctrine worthy only of swine", as if a pig's pleasures were as good as a

poet's. Mill replied that pleasures differ in quality, not only in quantity. Higher pleasures use our distinctively human faculties: intellect, imagination, feeling and the moral sense. Lower pleasures are those of the body, which we share with animals. To find out which pleasure is higher, ask competent judges, people who have experienced both.

READING · CONTINUED

Pigs and Socrates

Mill was sure they would prefer the higher, discontent and all: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Critics reply that quality is a value other than pleasure, smuggled in, and that his judges look rather like educated Victorian gentlemen.

A second debate is about what gets judged. Act utilitarianism judges each act by its own

consequences: break the promise if that does more good this time. Rule utilitarianism judges acts by rules: follow the rule whose general acceptance produces the best results, such as a firm rule against punishing the innocent. Act utilitarians answer that keeping a rule when breaking it would do more good is irrational; J. J. C. Smart called it a kind of "rule-worship". Scholars still argue about which kind of utilitarian Mill was.

The Corniche Road

The coastal city of Valdora is deciding whether to close the Corniche, a busy seafront road, to cars, and turn it into a park with a cycle path. The council has asked for a utilitarian assessment. These are the groups affected, with the city's own estimates.

A

Drivers who use the Corniche

B

Residents along the Corniche

C

People with asthma in the district

20,000 people. Each journey to work becomes 10 to 15 minutes longer, every working day.

6,000 people. Much less traffic noise and cleaner air outside their homes.

About 1,500 people, by the city health office's estimate. Fewer bad days are expected, but doctors disagree about how many.

D

Shopkeepers and staff on the Corniche

E

Residents of Hillside, a lower-income district inland

F

Visitors to the new seafront park

About 600 people. Cafes expect more walkers and customers. The car-repair garage and the petrol station expect to close.

9,000 people. The diverted traffic will pass their homes: more noise and fumes.

Perhaps 30,000 visits a month, from all over the city. A pleasant place to walk, cycle and play, if it is well built and kept.

Run the numbers

Task Score each group on the cards in "The Corniche Road", total the scores, and decide: should Valdora close the road? Then write one thing your grid could not capture.

How to score each group

Give it 1 to 3 for intensity (how strongly each person feels it), 1 to 3 for duration (how long it lasts) and 1 to 3 for certainty (how sure it is to happen). Add the three numbers.

1

Then weigh it by extent

Multiply by the number of people in thousands (20,000 people = 20). Write the result as a plus for pleasure or a minus for pain. A mixed group can have two scores.

2

Then decide

Add up all six groups. If the total is above zero, the calculus says close the road. Note every place where the two of you disagreed about a score.

3

Run the numbers

Group

Intensity

1–3

Duration

1–3

Certainty

1–3

Sum

× extent

(thousands)

Score

+ or −

A

Drivers who use the Corniche

B

Residents along the Corniche

C

People with asthma in the district

D

Shopkeepers and staff on the Corniche

E

Residents of Hillside

F

Visitors to the new seafront park

Total

What did the numbers miss?

1. Who should choose the scores: experts, the council, or the people affected?

2. Can one family's lost livelihood be outweighed by thousands of pleasant walks?

3. Should it matter that Hillside is poorer than the Corniche?

4. Is ten minutes in traffic comparable with a child's asthma attack?

5. Where you live, are decisions like this made by numbers, by votes or by protest?

6. If the numbers should not decide, what should?

What the theory says

A strict act utilitarian

P for all four cases. Five deaths are worse than one, however they come about.

Philippa Foot (1967)

Posed the original case, with a tram driver, in an essay on abortion and the doctrine of double effect. She asked why steering towards the one seems allowed when a judge may not frame an innocent man to stop a riot that would cost five lives.

Most people

P for the switch, N for the footbridge and the surgeon. The loop divides them. The gap between the theory's verdicts and ordinary verdicts is the trolley problem.

Judith Jarvis Thomson

Named "the trolley problem" and added the footbridge in 1976. In 1985 she moved the choice to a bystander at a switch and added the loop, arguing that a little extra track cannot make the moral difference. In 2008 she changed her mind: the bystander may not turn the trolley either.

A rule utilitarian

Can say N to the surgeon: in a world where doctors may kill patients for their organs, nobody dares go to hospital, and far more people die.

THE QUESTION FOR THE LENS

When a theory's verdict clashes with your gut, which should give way?

READING

The child in the pond

In 1971, amid the refugee crisis and famine in East Bengal, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer wrote "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1972). Its principle is short: "if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it."

His famous example: if I see a child drowning in a shallow pond, I ought to wade in and pull the child out, though my clothes will be ruined. Two things that seem to matter, Singer argues, do not. Distance: a child starving far away has the same claim on me as the child in the pond.

READING · CONTINUED

The child in the pond

Numbers: that millions of others could also help does not excuse me, any more than other passers-by would excuse me at the pond. So giving is a duty, not an optional kindness. Critics raise the demandingness objection: a morality that asks this much leaves no room for a life of one's own.

Singer's argument helped inspire effective altruism, a movement named in Oxford in 2011, which uses evidence to find where money or a career will do the most good. Critics say it favours what can be measured, treats symptoms rather than political

causes, and puts large sums in a few hands. Its hardest test came in November 2022, when the cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been one of the movement's best-known donors. In 2023 a US jury convicted him of fraud and conspiracy, and in 2024 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Critics asked whether outcome-based thinking had excused the means; defenders replied that no serious version of the view permits fraud.

Should I have stopped?

Task Speaker A argues yes, Speaker B argues no. Take 2 minutes each to make your case, then 4 minutes of open exchange. Then drop your roles, and each of you writes a number from 1 to 5 for the statement.

"Not giving money that would save a life is as bad as walking past a drowning child."

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

Speaker A: yes, it is as bad

Speaker B: no, it is not as bad

Use Singer's principle. Show why distance and the number of other people who could help make no moral difference. Then answer B's strongest point.

Find the real differences: how certain it is that your money helps, one emergency against endless need, who is responsible (governments, the causes of poverty), what we owe our own families, and how much morality can ask.

The experience machine

Task Read the first paragraph, then privately write YES or NO before you read on. Keep it to yourself for now.

Imagine that neuroscientists could connect your brain to a machine that gives you any experiences you want. You would feel exactly as if you were writing a great novel, making a friend or reading a fascinating book. In fact you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. You choose your life's experiences in advance, and once inside, you do not know you are in the machine.

Would you plug in for the rest of your life?

READING

The experience machine

Robert Nozick posed this question in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), expecting most readers to refuse. If pleasant experience were all that mattered, the machine would offer the perfect life. Our hesitation suggests we care about more: we want to actually do things, not only to have the experience of doing them; we want to be a certain kind of

person; and we want contact with a reality deeper than one that people have built. The target is hedonism, the view that pleasure is the only thing good in itself, which Bentham and Mill both held. It is not a refutation of consequentialism as such: some consequentialists count achievement, knowledge or friendship among the good results.

Plug in?

1. Did you write YES or NO? What is the strongest reason on the other side?

In a 2010 study, the philosopher Felipe De Brigard asked people to imagine they were already living in such a machine. Many said they would stay in it.

2. Does that study weaken Nozick's argument, or show only that we fear change?

3. Can a happy life built on false beliefs still be a good life?

4. Are video games or social media small versions of the machine?

5. If pleasure is not the only good, what else should a utilitarian count?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of a decision you made that affected other people. Whose happiness did you count, and whose did you leave out?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Which of Bentham's seven dimensions matters most to you when you choose how to spend a free evening?

Before Lesson 3

This week, find one decision (a government's, a company's or your own) defended only by its results, and write what the numbers left out.

Consequences

Duty

It might be a new law, a price change, a hospital waiting list or a family plan. Note who gained, who lost, and whether anyone asked the losers.

Character

Next lesson: Duty and Dignity: Kant. What if some things are wrong whatever the consequences?

Relationships

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key

RUN THE NUMBERS one worked example; other scores are reasonable, and the disagreement is the lesson

• A. Drivers: intensity 1, duration 3, certainty 3 = 7, times 20 = minus 140.

• B. Residents along the Corniche: 2 + 3 + 2 = 7, times 6 = plus 42.

• C. People with asthma: 3 + 3 + 1 = 7, times 1.5 = plus 10.5.

• D. Shopkeepers and staff: a mixed group. Gains and losses roughly cancel out = 0 (but the garage and petrol-station families lose heavily).

• E. Hillside residents: 2 + 3 + 3 = 8, times 9 = minus 72.

• F. Park visitors: 2 + 3 + 1 = 6, times 30 = plus 180, if visits are counted as people.

• Total: plus 20.5. The calculus says close the road, but only just. Points to draw out: group F's number is a guess about visits, not people, and it decides the result; one point less of intensity for the park visitors would flip the verdict, and one point more for the drivers brings the total almost to zero; and Hillside's loss is outweighed even though it falls on the poorer district. The calculus adds up happiness, but it says nothing about how it is shared.

WHAT THE THEORY SAYS is itself the reveal for "Five lives or one". There is no single right answer to the four cases.