Needless to say, this view of morality is strongly at odds with traditional
ethical views and common intuitions. It is also a highly demanding moral view, requiring us, on some views, to make very great personal sacrifices, such as giving most of our income to help needy strangers in distant countries (Kagan, 1989 and Singer, 1972). A great deal of recent research has focused on hypothetical moral dilemmas in which participants must decide whether to sacrifice the life of one person in order to save the lives of Fulvestrant mw a greater number. In this large and growing literature, when individuals endorse this specific type of harm they are described (following Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001) as making utilitarian judgments; when they reject it, they are said to be making non-utilitarian (or deontological) judgments. 2 This terminology suggests that such ‘utilitarian’ judgments express the kind of general impartial concern for the greater good that is at the heart of utilitarian ethics. This is a widely held assumption. For example, it has been argued that this research shows that utilitarian judgment
is uniquely based in deliberative processing involving a cost-benefit analysis of the act that would lead to the greatest good, while, by contrast, non-utilitarian judgment is driven by instinctual emotional aversion to causing ‘up-close-and-personal’ harm selleck to another person ( Greene, 2008). It has even been argued that this empirical evidence about the psychological sources of utilitarian and non-utilitarian judgment can help explain the historical debate between utilitarians and their opponents ( Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004) and, more radically, even that it should lead us to adopt a utilitarian approach to ethics ( Greene, 2008 and Singer, 2005). However, as we have pointed out in earlier work, these large
theoretical claims are problematic. (-)-p-Bromotetramisole Oxalate This is because endorsing harm in the unusual context of sacrificial dilemmas need not express anything resembling an impartial concern for the greater good (Kahane, 2014 and Kahane and Shackel, 2010). Indeed, the sacrificial dilemmas typically used in current research represent only one, rather special, context in which utilitarian considerations happen to directly conflict with non-utilitarian rules or intuitions. To be willing to sacrifice one person to save a greater number is merely to reject (or overrule) one such non-utilitarian rule. Such rejection, however, is compatible with accepting extreme non-utilitarian rules in many other contexts—rules about lying, retribution, fairness or property, to name just a few examples, not to mention non-impartial moral norms permitting us give priority to ourselves, and to our family or compatriots, over others.