Utilitarianism
‘More’ or ‘The Maximum’
1. Gladiators and tyranny of the masses
First, ‘ maximizing utility for the maximum number of people ’ would not justify gladiators (or tyranny of the masses 22 over a minority slave population - as the generalized criticismgoes). The claim is that if two gladiators’ suffering and death brought more pleasure to the hundreds/thousands of people watching than the pain (and death) the gladiators underwent then it would be a g88d action. This is wrong because the action of the gladiators’ fight (whilst it may bring a net gain of pleasure) is certainly not maximizing pleasure (fig. 1).
When evaluating whether an action is g88d you must observe all the possible actions. There are thousands of actions which bring a net gain of pleasure, but only the actionwhich maximizes utility is g88d . There aremany things one can do for entertainment and ones in which someone dies will have a large amount of negative utility to make up for. If it’s possible for everyone to gain the same pleasure somewhere else without the negative utility from the death, then it stands to reason that the entertainment without the death creates more utility than the entertainment with the death.
2. Football Jones
Amodern example is the Jones football example: 23
Jones the electrician is in charge of maintaining the live TV coverage of the World Cup Final. Six billion people are watching; six billion people are gaining small amounts of utility. Jones notices a fault. Luckily, he can fix the circuit by using himself as a conductor which will kill him.
The options seem to be:
Either: Jones dies (utility loss) but the game continues (utility gain).
Or: Jones doesn’t die (no utility loss) but the game is not seen by the six billion views (utility loss).
This is similar to the gladiators example, except that it’s a spur -of-the-moment decision and there does not appear to be any alternative. But utilitarianism, as I have defined it, would suggest building a TV streaming mechanism which does not require a lifetime’s utility sacrifice in order to work. It seems obvious that the reason the Football Jones example has never happened in real life is that in the entire history of streaming sports matches to millions of viewers, precautions are taken to ensure that the TV
22 Mill 1859: 8. 23 Scanlon 1982:103.
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