Revisiting the Objections 102 

Just as we can fail to imagine that Craig is morally permitted to kill Jack and Jill, we can fail to imagine that an act maximizes pleasure minus pain. To begin with, consider the following variant of Transplant:

FAILED TRANSPLANT

Six patients lie sedated in their beds. Sarah can kill and use the organs of one patient to attempt to save five others. If she does, all six patients will die. In the ensuing outrage, the public will stop trusting in the healthcare system, leading to many fatalities and missed treatments. Killing the patient maximizes pleasure minus pain, while not killing her does not.

At least initially, I tend to misimagine this case. I successfully imagine every proposition except for the last one – i.e., that killing the patient maximizes pleasure minus pain. Instead, I imagine a different case where killing the pa- tient does not maximize pleasure minus pain. Only with some effort, I can force myself to imagine the case correctly; for example, I can imagine a bomb

that will kill millions of people if Sarah does not kill the patient – that would explain why killing her maximizes pleasure minus pain. But this is not what I first imagine when I encounter Failed Transplant. Because it is liable to make us misimagine it, Failed Transplant is obviously not a useful case for objecting to utilitarianism. When I try to imagine Failed Transplant, I successfully im- agine a case in which it is intuitively morally wrong to kill the patient. But the content of that moral intuition does not give me any reason to reject utilitari- anism, because in the case that I do in fact imagine, as opposed to the case that I try to imagine, killing the patient does not maximize pleasure minus pain. Utilitarianism does not imply that Sarah should kill the patient in the case that I imagine. In essence, I have the right moral intuition, but it is about the wrong

case.

Consider now the original variant of the case: TRANSPLANT

Six patients lie sedated in their beds. Sarah can maximize pleasure mi- nus pain by killing patient Six and use her organs to save the lives of the other five patients. If she does not kill patient Six, the other five patients will die, and Sarah will produce a less than optimal amount of pleasure minus pain.

For this case too, I propose, there is a risk that we misimagine it. In Failed Transplant the problem is that we actively imagine that propositions like the following are true: “In the ensuing outrage, the public will stop trusting in the healthcare system, leading to many fatalities and missed treatments.” In con- trast, in Transplant the problem is that we passively imagine such proposi- tions. We passively imagine what is natural to assume to be true in a case, and it is natural to assume that someone will find out about the transplant, and that this will result in fatalities due to a lack of trust in the healthcare system. It is also natural to assume that transplants are not always successful due to, for example, tissue rejection, incompetence, infection, and so on. Therefore, it is likely that our passive imagination will interfer with our attempt to actively imagine that killing the patient does in fact maximize pleasure minus pain in Transplant.

Corresponding arguments can be made for the other two cases that I have discussed:

EXPERIENCE MACHINE

William has the chance to plug into an experience machine. If he plugs in, he will be extremely well off in terms of pleasure minus pain. He will have these experiences for the rest of his life. Therefore,

plugging in produces the most pleasure minus pain of any act availa- ble to him.

UTILITY MONSTER

Tim has resources available to him that can either help a thousand in- dividual humans feel some amount of pleasure or help a non-human creature feel much more pleasure. Tim will maximize pleasure minus pain if and only if he gives the creature all of his resources.

In Experience Machine, it is natural to imagine that machines often break down, that they do not always receive the proper level of maintenance, that they can be hacked and controlled by malicious actors, that others are not good at determining what will actually give us more pleasure and less pain, and that mere entertainment is nearly always less conducive to pleasure minus pain than is helping other humans and animals. In Utility Monster, it is natural to imagine that giving the resources to the monster will face steep declining mar- ginal returns on the investment, and that the monster, like any other creature known to us, has a maximum level of pleasure that can be obtained by spend- ing resources. In both cases, these natural assumptions interfere with us imag- ining that the relevant acts (i.e., connecting to the machine and giving the monster the resources) do in fact maximize pleasure minus pain.

Again, recall that the problem is not that we cannot imagine that these acts maximize pleasure minus pain. To do this, we need merely imagine a feature that makes it natural to assume that pleasure minus pain is maximized. For example, we can imagine that a bomb will kill millions of people if the agent does not kill the patient, plug in to the experience machine, or give the creature the resources. But such a “brute force” approach is not useful for constructing objections to utilitarianism, for obvious reasons: in such revised cases it is also intuitively obligatory to kill the patient, to plug into the experience machine, and to give the resources to the creature.

My proposal is that the mere risk that these cases are being misimagined should lead us to consider revised cases instead. These revised cases should be ones where it is not unnatural to assume that the acts under consideration do, in fact, maximize pleasure minus pain. In doing so, we will of course need to stay true to the spirit of each objection – we cannot simply add that a bomb will explode if Sarah operates on the patient. I will now consider two general ways in which to carry out such revisions. First, I will consider adding details to the cases that make it more natural to assume that the relevant acts maxim- ize pleasure minus pain. Second, I will consider removing details from the cases – not in the sense of making the list of stipulated propositions shorter, but by including propositions that ensure there is less room for our passive imagination to fill out the cases in the wrong way.