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Utilitarian morality

שו”תCategory: moralUtilitarian morality
asked 5 years ago

Good evening Rabbi, sorry for the awkward wording.
I wondered a bit about the very existence of utilitarian morality. This method seems to assume the limits of the situation.
I will explain, let’s take a hypothetical case where in order to save two people I have to sacrifice a person along the way. Utilitarian morality would argue that I should do this because in the end we will achieve the greatest good. But we must wonder whether the situation actually ends at that moment. For example, a hypothetical case where one of the two who were saved decides to murder people by blowing up a bus and causes the deaths of five people. If we knew about this at the moment of the rescue, utilitarian morality would say that we should save one and not both, because saving the two would cause the deaths of five.
We will never know what the consequences and the consequences of the consequences will be and so on, so there will never be an absolute utilitarian morality.
So even before redefining utilitarian morality as the morality of the limits of human understanding, I just wanted to point out that they have moved from a message of utilitarian morality to a morality of the moral act.

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מיכי Staff answered 5 years ago

I didn’t understand the argument. We never have certainty in our assessment of reality. So what? That’s why we won’t use reality assessments? The simple assumption is that people don’t murder and it’s reasonable to make the utility calculations on that assumption.

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