Where my people at?

So Ben took us in a different direction last week, music, now I shall take us in another completely different direction: Philosophy. In the heading of our blog it says that it is a blog about (partly) philosophy, so it is about damn time we got cracking on some of it.

My query revolves around the ethics of utilitarianism and its application to population issues. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that was championed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill back in the 1800's. In gist form it can be understood like so: Act in such a way so that the consequences of your actions are likely to yield the greatest amount of good (Mill used the word "good" Bentham used the word "happiness.") Probably the most famous (or infamous) decision ever made using utility as a defense was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America made the decision to decimate two Japanese targets in order to "save a million lives."

But I don't really want to get into applying utilitarian ethics to the problem of overpopulation just yet, we can save that for a little later, let the ethical juices marinate over the topic while we handle some smaller utilitarian issues.

It is obviously very important how one chooses to define the "good" in Mill's formulation of utilitarianism. For example, in a hypothetical situation where you are forced to sacrifice one group in order to save another, where the first is a group of three doctors (brain surgeon, heart surgeon, and a pediatrician) and the second is a group of fifteen teachers (five elementary, five middle school, five high school), how does one make a decision that maximizes the "good." Is it better to save the doctors due to the fact that they can help to save more lives in the future and provide care that will improve the general health of many people? Or is it better to save the teachers who will be able to enhance the minds of several future generations potentially providing an incredible amount of good to their students (hell, maybe even due to the teachings of one of these educators one of their students becomes a doctor)? Perhaps we don't even bother to think about the potential benefits of saving either party, but simply go on numbers. Sacrificing 15 lives to save 3 seems like a decent trade, and it seems reasonable to think that, given the predicament, saving the 15 is the best way to maximize the "good." Yet what if a third group was added: 100 homeless people. You can still only save one group. Now it seems odd to go just on numbers because (and this is a bit harsh) it seems as if the doctors and teachers will clearly produce more good if they are saved than the homeless will produce.

For my money, I save the teachers, even with the presence of the 100 person homeless group, I think the potential benefit that the teachers could have on their students will reap benefits that may never end. If through their work the teachers help produce students who get decent jobs and start families (or maybe become doctors or environmental scientists), then the potential spider web of goodness seems almost infinite. The doctors on the other hand specialize on keeping people alive and healthy. This has clear benefits and certainly falls under the category of "good," but the teachers whole job is focused around expanding minds and growing individuals, the doctors don't really get into that aspect of life, they are more concerned with keeping people alive and healthy, which can have a sweet spider web of goodness attached to it as well, but looking at the purpose of a doctor next to the purpose of a teacher I think the teacher has a leg up on producing more "good."

So, what do people think of utilitarianism in general, what group would you save (teachers vs doctors........teachers vs. doctors vs. homeless)?

PHILOSOPHY!