It’s a slippery slope with drastic unintended consequences though. Luigi Mangione can argue he transferred the intent to the evil healthcare system, and its CEO was just a killer he had to stop.
Any form of utiliitarianism fails on its own terms both because the future can never be 100 percent known (that’s why it’s the future rather than the past), and the consequences of one’s actions don’t simply end at killing 1, saving 5 (even if that was actually how it played out.) The consequences of normalizing killing people you think are net harmful would be vast.
If you do decide to intervene to prevent a mass shooter, for example, you do so not out of a trolley-problem calculation, but out of an instinct. But you are surely taking a risk if you do so. Some risks are worth taking, but utilitarian justifications won’t bail you out if things go south IMO.
I don’t think rejecting entirely the utilitarian argument is morally acceptable. One can justify horrific inaction and that’s a much slipperier slope. Don’t get me wrong, I too believe the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but surely there is some universally agreeable standard of truth in at least some reasonable circumstances.
I agree one can’t know with certainty anything about the future. You may throw something up and there is a chance it might not come down, but there is an absurdity in using this as justification for any moral decision.
I agree, you can’t require absolute certainty to act — it’s an impossible standard, but it does destroy the utilitarian calculation, both that and the fact that the results of the proposed action are never all in, the math and permutations are too vast.
Best we can do in legal settings is things like “reasonable person” standards and determination of intent. But the trolley problem and what it represents is the logic behind covid lockdowns, vaccine mandates and so many other horrors, i.e., it takes us ever farther away from a just society.
I think transfer of intent solves the slippery slope problem of utilitarian argument, modulo issues of certainty. It takes the lever puller out of the causal loop and allows a numerically superior result of the bad actions of the responsible party.
I get what you’re saying, but the quest for the “numerically superior result” and absolution for its pursuers is the part of the slope that’s steepest and iciest, as we saw during covid.
I disagree. You assume the intent was good during Covid. It wasn’t good. At every level there was malintent, from top to bottom, including the nurse getting paid to vaccinate people who weren’t choosing to be vaccinated but sought vaccination under threat of loss of employment. That’s malintent. Nurse is still guilty.
I agree it was criminal but if you asked them they'd say it was important to do whatever it took to maximize uptake in a "deadly" pandemic. Many told themselves they were saving lives. The "greater good" is the scourge itself as it can always be captured.
The argument is not the ends justify the means nor a numerical supremacy of outcome one for Covid. Transfer of intent only applies to parties without malintent. The fact that malintent gets diffused over many responsible parties doesn’t absolve any of them.
From a narrow legal standpoint, I don’t see why you couldn’t do that — they do it in the other direction already for felony murder. The driver of the getaway car’s intent to particpate in the felony supplies his mens rea for the murder that happened while he was in the car.
This would just be move the intent from the rescuer to the murderer rather than from the murderer to his co-felon.
But can’t have people thinking they’re pulling the “lever” for “the “greater good.” Just something to bring up in self defense after you act out of instinct. Sorry if I went a little afield of your initial post — I just despise the uliltarian mentality so much, and the trolley problem is the quintessential example of it.
Exactly. Law should ultimately promote proper function and justice in society. But lawyers have done a good job of arranging it otherwise.
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