Dialectic: Utilitarianism and Deontology

How do we view the world? How do we define morality? How can we know what is right and what is wrong? What is our criteria?

You are on a sinking raft in the middle of the ocean. There are four people on the raft. If there was one less person, the raft would not sink. So the question is: do you throw off the heaviest (or weakest or meanest, etc. any) person in order to save the rest? Do you take action that will end this one person’s life and thus commit murder? Or do you try to maintain a “more honorable, higher sense of morality” and condemn everyone to death through inaction?

I would argue that we must frame our minds in order to direct our actions with the intent of doing the best for the most people. Sacrifices must be made and are made, every day. We have to concentrate on doing the greatest good, in the end. Any short-term suspension of morality is merely an embrace of a larger morality that is rational.

But of course we cannot simply suspend our morality, even if we believe it is in order to help more people in the long-term. It is not up to us to act in order to decide to end one’s life, even if for a greater good. If we can find a way to justify murder, then we have no framework for evaluating or establishing any sense of morality whatsoever.

But surely we have to work toward the idea of a greater morality. If we have to sacrifice one life to save two, so be it. We cannot assign individuals more value to life than others. We cannot arbitrarily, based on how we feel, say that we will allow more lives to be destroyed because we cannot bring ourselves to accept the deaths of a few.

Actually I think the best way to frame our minds in terms of morality is to adopt a utilitarian mindset and evaluate terminal consequences, but also somehow think about deontology in order to place a check on the means so that we don’t justify too much horror. Of course this is hardly helpful, there’s no way to know exactly how to view things, so I suggest one errs on the side of the utilitarian. But this dialectic exhibits that there is no ultimate reality, no way of defining it.