< An Ethical Concept I Can't Grasp

~tiernan

I am not well read enough in utilitarianism to answer the main question, but at the beginning you stated, "Is it a powerful, moral intuition, or have I simply been trained in this viewpoint by our culture?" I would contend that it would have to be an intuition, since culture is a product of people, who, in order to instill their morality into the culture they created, would need to get it from a previous culture, ad infinitum.

Your paragraph discussing the possibility of infinite care and comfort is revealing. It seems like you might be torn on consequentialism here, because if the death of the five and the one will both cause no suffering in others, the consequences are negligible and thus neither moral action is "better". You are right that it has to do with the intrinsic value of humans, which determines whether the act of killing them is intrinsically wrong, regardless of the outcome. If human value is merely subjective, and the five/one both cause no grief, then neither moral action is better.

I don't know if you think humans have intrinsic value, or that actions can be right/wrong regardless of outcome. (For full disclosure, I do). Settling these 'first principle' issues will probably give you more consistency tackling these problems.

I would also rebut zampano's first commenter on the other post who said consistency is not important. It is. A philosophy is LIVED. Those 'insufferable nerds' are challenging what is essentially a lifestyle put into words. An inconsistent lifestyle (with confusing/arbitrary decisions) will lead to chaos.

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