A utilitarian approach states that whichever action allows the greatest number of people to live would be the moral one. This perspective holds in the commonly-referenced related scenario, the “fat man” case, which asks whether you would push a fat man off a bridge to stop a trolley in its path and block it from running over five people. (This scenario involves a “fat man” to eliminate the possibility of self-sacrifice—your weight wouldn’t stop the trolley, but his would.) The utilitarian answer is that the moral decision is to sacrifice the heavyweight man, because you’d still be killing one to save five.
By contrast, many deontological moral theories, such as the moral laws proffered by 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, argue that killing is never acceptable—it would be immoral to pull the lever to kill one, even if that meant allowing the trolley to continue on its course to kill 100 people. Allowing harm to happen, by failing to stop the trolley continuing on its path, is not actively hurting someone and so would not be considered murder. And so, according to Kant, actively pulling the lever would be the immoral choice. [...]
Earp says the new scale should create a more nuanced psychological understanding of utilitarians. For example, he says, two key concepts within the theory—that welfare should be maximized for all, and that you should be willing to do “instrumental harm” to achieve such welfare—seem to be in psychological tension. Those who tend to be focused on the former seem to be instinctively more reluctant to enact the instrumental harm required by utilitarianism. Conversely, those who are less concerned about the instrumental harm tend to have a reduced sense of welfare for all. “The people who are not so fussed about causing instrumental harm and say, ‘yeah, I’d be willing to tolerate torture if that was necessary to stop a bomb going off’—those people tend to be relatively low on the impartial-beneficence side of the scale,” he says. “In the general population utilitarianism is not an intuitive position.”
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