Utilitarianism: For and Against

"This is a book of two halves. The first half is written by a very eminent Australian philosopher and I can’t remember a word of it, but the second half was important to me. I was a pretty pure utilitarian until I read it, and it countered a lot of the influence of Peter Singer. Williams is a critic of utilitarianism – he thinks it is a deeply simplistic way to view the moral world. He gives a couple of famous examples which illustrate why, and which show the aspects of morality which utilitarianism can’t capture. The first example is this. Imagine you’re in a Latin American country, and you come across a guerilla leader who is about to kill 20 Indians (a somewhat politically incorrect use of that term). He says, if you kill one of them, I won’t kill the other 19. Should you do it? Williams says that from a utilitarian point of view, of course you should kill the one person to save the other 19. But that’s to miss that it’s you who’s doing the killing. Utilitarianism sees everything from a bird’s eye view, and doesn’t realise that you’re involved with the consequences of your actions. The second example is a character called George, who is very anti nuclear power. He’s short of money, needs work and is offered a job in a biochemical plant. The job pays well – means he can look after his wife and kids – and although he doesn’t believe in the work, if he doesn’t do it then someone else will do it even better, and promote this industry which he objects to. Williams again says that from a utilitarian point of view, George should take the job. But that fails to capture the question of integrity. Associating your life and career with something that you so deeply resent and oppose would be an attack on your integrity. You could give that answer, but that’s an answer within the utilitarian framework. That’s saying that utilitarians have just got the calculation wrong – that they think this would make the world happier, but it won’t. To some extent you can quantify happiness. You know that 19 lives are better than no lives, for instance. Happiness is not an easy thing to measure, but you can say sensible things about what makes people happy and what doesn’t. But while your objection is saying that from a utilitarian point of view it might be wrong, Williams argues that even if utilitarians say the answer is clear-cut that George should take the job, that misses the issue of integrity."