According to the principle of utilitarianisn, our one moral duty is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. An objection to this idea is that there is more to life than pleasure; knowledge and virtue are important among many other things. A response to this would be that utilitarianisn requires that we consider everyone’s pleasure and not just our own. There is more to life than just physical pleasure and that many people could even say that they find pleasure from acquiring knowledge and some other things people do not view as physically pleasurable (pleasure is relative). Another objection would be that just because something makes people happy does not make it right. It is wrong to harm individuals in order to make others happy. The example used in class was if five people each needed a certain organ and one healthy person could supply all five of those organs – it seems beneficial to kill one person to save five, right? A response could be that the person could willingly sacrifice him/herself to help these five people live, since he’s saving more people than he might be worth. If all lives are equal then you are saving four lives.
Another thing to complicate utilitarianism is whether right actions should be based on foreseeable consequences or actual consequences. For instance if a person saves someone who is drowning but later it is revealed that the drowning person was a mass murderer was it a morally right action to save them?
Yes, it was still morally right to save them based on the motive of the saver and not the motive of the people who knew that he was a mass murderer.