Justice ~ #2b ~ How to Measure Pleasure

To answer these questions, view the first half of Harvard University's video:  Episode 2, Part 2, starting at 24:12.

How are we supposed to figure out what to do in a particular, real-life situation?  Suppose that we have to choose between building a new sports stadium and building a new hospital.  According to Bentham, we should consider how much pleasure sports fans would get if we were to build a new stadium, and how much pain sick people would be relieved of if we were to build a new hospital.  If building the stadium would produce a greater balance of pleasure, then we should build the stadium.

1.  Is it true that happiness is simply pleasure and the absence of pain, and that the goal of all human action should be pleasure?  Or is utilitarianism too crude as a moral doctrine?

2.  Are all goods commensurable?  Can they all be weighed on a common scale, or is it possible that the value of some goods, such as love, cannot coherently be balanced against the value of other goods, like money?  Is this a fatal problem for utilitarianism?

3.  Does utilitarianism threaten individual rights?  John Stuart Mill believed that protecting individual rights is the best way to increase the sum of happiness in the long run.  Was Mill right?  Either way, is this really the reason why we should not violate people’s basic rights?

Justice ~ #2a ~ Putting a Price Tag on Life

To answer these questions, view the first half of Harvard University's video:  Episode 2, Part 1.

According to the principle of utility, we should always do whatever will produce the greatest amount of happiness and whatever is necessary to prevent the greatest amount of unhappiness.

1.  There are times when the only way to prevent harm to a large number of people is to harm a smaller number of people.  Is it always permissible to harm a smaller number in order to prevent harm to a large number?

2.  Ten thousand innocent civilians live next to a munitions factory in a country at war.  If you bomb the factory, all of them will die.  If you don’t bomb the factory, it will be used to produce bombs that will be dropped on fifty thousand innocent civilians in another country.  What’s the right thing to do?

Justice ~ #1b ~ The Case for Cannibalism

To answer these questions, view the first half of Harvard University's video:  Episode 1, Part 2, starting at 24:15.

Sandel introduces the principles of utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, with a famous nineteenth century law case involving a shipwrecked crew of four.  After nineteen days lost at sea, the captain decides to kill the cabin boy, the weakest among them, so they can feed on his blood and body to survive.  That was an actual case, but think about today:  Suppose four shipwrecked sailors are stranded at sea, without food or water.  Would it be wrong for three of them to kill and eat the weakest one, in order to save their own lives?

Justice ~ #1a ~ The Moral Side of Murder

To answer these questions, view the first half of Harvard University's video:  Episode 1, Part 1.

If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing — what would you do?  What would be the right thing to do?  That’s the hypothetical scenario Professor Michael Sandel uses to launch his course on moral reasoning.