Do the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few?
A couple of days ago, in my philosophy class, my teacher presented this thought experiment:
You are the captain of a ship.
It’s the middle of the night, your ship is going under.
You gather roughly 14 people with you, quickly hop onto a lifeboat and escape. But there is a problem.
The lifeboat can only sustain 8 people, meaning the other 7people have to get off it if the 7 have any chance at survival. If nobody gets off, everyone dies.
You propose that the 7 unhealthiest people should be the ones to leave the lifeboat and sacrifice themselves since biologically speaking, the other 8 will have the best chance of surviving.
Now the moral dilemma becomes:
Does saving the 8, justify sacrificing the 7?
As my childhood hero, Commander Spock would like to say, “the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”
But does it?
Before we answer that or at least attempt to, we have to identify some things. Firstly, this way of thinking is known as utilitarianism. According to this, people make choices and act based on what is good for the majority of the collective, even if it is at the cost of the minority. Utilitarian ethics state:
We ought to act always as to produce the greatest good for the greatest possible number.
Secondly, there is this inadvertent lack of data. And this is usually the argument against justifying the murder of the 8 people. It is unknown as to who those 14 other people are as of now.
However, this “argument” is actually a longer route to the same utilitarian morale and I’ll get to that later.
But, we do have to ask who exactly those people are and know a little more about themselves. For all you know, there could be a healthy murderer who would be chosen to live on and an unhealthy innocent would have to die.
Having established these two things, my class broke off into a pseudo-chaotic debate and the majority of the class raised their hand and voted to sacrifice the 7.
Then our teacher proposed another question, what if you were one of those 7?
The number of hands significantly dropped, due to either uncertainty or simply self-preservation. And this leads me to the article: Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, even when ‘the few’ include you?
And now that we have our question,
The most common adaptation of Utilitarianism is a very Hedonistic one. For those who don’t know what Hedonism is, it’s basically where it any action that is the best for you is the morally right one. It is a very selfish way of living but for some people, it is a cultural dynamic they’ve grown up in where their goal is to do whatever is best for them.
The hedonistic utilitarians are the ones who are all for the greater good as long as they are in the ‘greater’ for whom its good. The greater good goes out the window when they are the ones to pay the cost. This was why many of my friends put their hands down when the second question was asked.
Now, I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but I wasn’t one of them.
But you can’t even blame them for morally feeling this way, a sense of self-preservation is engraved into us genetically through evolution. If you don’t believe me, just ask Charles Darwin.
The argument for utilitarianism is that it logically makes sense that doing what is good for the majority will lead to the highest chances of survival; these lead to two sub-categories of utilitarianism which are rule-utilitarianism and act-utilitarianism. These state that rules should be made with the intention of doing the most ‘good’ for the majority and actions that do the most ‘good’ for the majority aren’t wrong.
A commonly famous example used to conceptualize these ideas is Batman and Joker.
And the question that gets asked is: should Batman kill Joker?
Now, if you haven’t seen the movies or read the comics, Batman doesn’t kill. He is against it and it goes against his morality. Not to mention it is still illegal even if you have a billion-dollar suit and look cool while doing it. But a utilitarian would say that killing Joker would actually be ethically right because it would stop Joker from killing others, which does the most good for the majority.
Rule utilitarianism would make it a rule to kill the person that kills multiple, and act utilitarians would say that it is the best course of action.
But the problem, in the second point still remains. A lack of data. For a lot of people, killing someone even as sinister as Joker is questionable, but what if the Joker had killed your parents? For many, that makes the decision much easier. But then what if we said that the Joker mostly kills criminals with some innocent casualties? The choice becomes a bit harder, doesn’t it?
To go to the argument against utilitarianism, that is the lack of data. If you think about it, that argument is still a utilitarian approach. If we ask as to why people seek further data on the topic, it isn’t to save lives or stop the killing, it is still to provide the most ‘good’ for the majority; since keeping a healthy killer on the lifeboat and sacrificing an unhealthy scientist won’t actually provide the most benefit to society.
This is one of the most beautifully stressful things about ethics and morality; there is no one universally accepted answer. It's not like math where 2+2=4 and 4–1=3.
There is no right answer to the question.
But that’s not the point either.
The point is to find your own ethical standpoint. This discussion and writing this article really made me realize that although I’m not a 100% utilitarian, I would still make the sacrifice if I was one of the unhealthy 7. This is quite contradictory to my life’s goal of leaving a memorable legacy behind but I guess as long as I’m not dying to save a murderer, I’ll be fine with my decision.
Hopefully, you liked this article, and maybe it inspired you to dive deeper into your own morality! This was different from my regular style of writing and a different topic entirely, but I loved the process of writing an article about ethics and philosophy, so I will definitely write more in the future.
So stay tuned!
If you have any questions or want to have a discussion about ethics or other topics:
- Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
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