Topic: The Right Thing to Do

The Trolley Problem

The Case of Richard Parker
- The Mignonette was on its way from England to Australia in 1884 when it began taking on water and
sinking. Four of the crew members made it out alive and were floating aboard a 13-foot lifeboat.
Nineteen days into the voyage the men began to stir. They were without food and drinkable water and
began to suggest cannibalism. Richard Parker was young (only 17), and therefore had no wife or
children to go back to. He was also in rough shape, so the other three men decided to kill and eat
Parker in order to survive. Five days later the men washed ashore and were eventually convicted of
murder and cannibalism. They were later released after the public sympathized with their situation.
(https://nigeriacircle.com/tops/flesh-and-bone-8-gruesome-cases-of-cannibalism-throughout-history/)

Morality – the proper way for human beings to treat one another

Objections:
1. Taking the law into one’s hands
2. Using human being, exploiting his vulnerability, taking one’s life without his consent

Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham) – The right thing to do is to pursue the greatest happiness for the greatest
number (of people)
- It asserts that morality means maximizing happiness. It means the overall balance of pleasure & pain.
- The right thing to do is to maximize utility
- Utility is whatever produces happiness and whatever prevents pain or suffering
- We are governed by pleasure and pain and they are our “sovereign masters”

Objection to utilitarianism
It fails to respect individual rights
(Respecting human rights means recognizing the intrinsic dignity of human being)

Libertarian - The Principle of Self-ownership (Robert Nozick)

- It is based on the right to liberty. The right to liberty means the right to do whatever we want with the
things we own, provided we respect other people’s rights to do the same
- That no one should be forced to help other people, e.g., Taxing the rich to help the poor (it means
coercing the rich)
- In the context of the value of human freedom, taxation of earnings would mean forced labor

The Principle of Self-ownership

- Everyone can say: I own myself, I own my labor and the fruit of my labor.
- The continuity of its reasoning: Taxation means taking my earnings, therefore it is a forced labor
(because it is taking my labor), further still it means slavery (because it denies that I own myself).

Objection to Libertarian ideas

- No one is self-sufficient
1. Taxation is not as bad as forced labor
Libertarian reply: No one should force to make that choice
2. The poor need the money more
Libertarian reply: It should be the free choice of the affluent to help the needy
3. The rich people depend on other people
Libertarian reply: They have voluntarily accepted their compensation
(DOLE on contractualization, SM, Jollibbe, Burger King, KFC)

Property right – the right to determine wat shall be done with what you own
- On selling one’s kidney
- The life-saving purposes (e.g., donating kidney) not for business to gain profit
(A prison inmate (1990, California) gave his kidney to his child and willing to give his other kidney for his
another child. But it was not allowed by the authorities.)
John Stuart Mill
- He is more humane and less calculating in his support of Bentham’s utilitarianism
Individual freedom: People should be free to do whatever they want, provided they do no harm to others
1. The government may not interfere with individual liberty in order to protect a person to him/herself,
drinking soda, cigarette
2. The government may not impose the majority’s beliefs about how best way to live

“My independence is, of right, absolute” – Mill

1. To respect individual liberty will lead to the greatest human happiness in the long run
- Killing drug addicts and pushers may make us peaceful today, but we could be worse off in the future
2. The highest end of the human life: the full and free development of his/her human faculties, e…g.,
one’s perception, judgment, intellect (to know the truth) and will (to choose what is good)
3. A human being – what we do is as important as the manner of doing what we do
- To earn a living (stealing or decent job)
4. For a human being, character matters
- For Mill, there is higher pleasure and lower pleasure (e.g., watching TV for hours or reading Plato and
Shakespeare)
- We always face temptation: postpone higher happiness to lower ones

In doing the right thing to do what matters is the motive – Kant

Preliminaries:
- Believing in the universal human rights, makes you not a utilitarian
- Universal human rights asserts that all human beings are worthy of respect
- It is wrong to treat a human being as a means (instrument) of the collective happiness

On utilitarianism
- To defend human rights on the ground that it will maximize utility in the long run means that it does not
respect the person (who holds them) but to make things better for the society

On libertarian ideas
- It asserts that a human person should not be used as means to bring about welfare of others and not at
the disposal of a society as a whole
Concerns on Libertarian
1. But libertarian ideas love unfettered market, no safety nets for the weak, e.g. contractualization (no
choice)
2. The government should not ease inequality and promote the common good
3. That consent matters, however self-inflicted harm is an affront to human dignity, e.g., to sell oneself to
slavery

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)

- For Kant, human being is a rational being who is worthy of dignity and respect
- The right thing to do means respecting persons as ends in themselves
- He is the precursor of the Universal Human Rights
- He connects justice and morality to freedom

Kant’s Objection to Utilitarianism

- Something that gives pleasure does not make it right (e.g., smoking cigarette)
- If a majority agree, e.g., policy, does not make it just (e.g., Putin’s regime in Russia)
- Morality cannot be based be based on interests, wants, desires, or preferences of people because
these factors are contingent
- Anything that makes you happy does not mean teaching you to be good, prudent and virtuous
- Basing morality on interest and preferences do not teach about what is right or wrong but only teach
you to become better at calculation

For Kant
 - The basis of morality is “pure practical reason”
- Human capacity: reason and freedom
- Human being
1. Rational being – being capable of reason
2. Autonomous being – capable of acting and choosing freely

For Kant
- Reason is sovereign
- Reason govern our will
- Our capacity for reason bounds our capacity for freedom
- Animals seek pleasure and avoidance of pain, therefore not acting freely
Ice cream:

For Kant
- To be free means acting autonomously, it means to act according to a law that I/you give to my/yourself
- It’s not biological or instinctive, not following a social convention
- Acting freely means choosing the end itself for its own sake
- It means doing the right thing for the right reason
- The motive or intention gives the moral worth of an action, it consists not in the consequences that flow
from it, but on the intention (i.e., the reason why an act is done)
- Doing the right thing because it is right, not for the sake of an ulterior motive (ulterior – something that
is kept hidden in order to get a particular result)
- Respecting the dignity and right of human being because it is the right thing to do. It also means
treating a human being as an end in itself.

“A good will is not good because of what it effects or\ accomplices. Even if his/her will is entirely lacking in
power to carry out its intentions; if by its utmost effort it still accomplishes nothing… even then it would still
shine like a jewel for its own sake as something which has its full value in itself.” - Kant

- A will is good whether or not it prevails.

- An action is morally good if it is done for the sake of the moral law not only that it conforms to the moral
law.

The Motive of Duty

- It means doing the right thing for the right reason, doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
The Motive of Inclination
- It means doing something for self-interest, it lacks moral worth (other examples, wants, desires,
preferences, and appetites
Example: A shop keeper, who tries to be honest because he wants his refutation be unblemished because its
good for his business and so that customers would stick to him.
- He does the right thing for the wrong reason, that is, for self-interest (to protect his reputation).
Therefore it lacks moral worth (but it is not also bad).

On the Motive of Duty

- To be honest for its own sake versus honesty for the sake of the bottomline (to get something)
- The moral worth of an action means doing something because it is right, not because it is useful or
pleasant or convenient.

On Helping Others; The compassion of an altruist

- To do good for others because it makes you feel happy, for Kant, it deserves praise and
encouragement but not esteem (Esteem – it means giving high regard to a truly deserving person)

Doing the Right Thing as a Moral Duty

- The good deed be done because it is the right thing to do – whether or not doing it gives us pleasure.
Michael Sandel, Justice, 2009.