Utilitarian Ethical Viewpoints

Sometimes a friend has views that either do not agree with our own, or appear to not even be consistent with each other. In the case of Sarah and Jamie, utilitarian ethical standpoints are brought into question. Utilitarianism is “the doctrine that the rightness of actions is to be judged by their consequences” (Shafer-Landau 78, 2015). It is a form of consequentialism that examines the consequences of actions, and if those actions produce happiness and pleasure (overall, not just for one person) and minimizes the amount of suffering, then that action is correct and morally right. Typically to determine this, one would perform the Happiness Calculus for actions A and B, and whichever one produced the greatest amount of pleasure is the action

More people would be saved (the pleasure aspect) than would die (the suffering aspect), so by doing the Happiness Calculus the correct choice was to drop the nuclear bombs. This view is impartial because it is taking simple numbers into account when deciding whether or not killing a large number of people is morally okay. Jamie is not being biased and saying that only some countries can attack to coerce others into submission, but rather a general statement that it is okay for any country to do so in order to stop/prevent a war. To a utilitarian, this unbiased, numerical-based point of view is one of the reasons bombing is morally

One problem with this strategy is with what actually counts, the expected consequence (the country surrenders) or the actual results? In the case of bombing a country and killing its citizens, there are more things that could happen than simply the country surrendering. A prime example of this is the United States war in the Middle East. To make Al Qaida surrender, the United States bombed cities where they were thought to be, sent in thousands of troops, and finally, after ten years the leader, Osama Bin Laden, was killed. But what was the cost of this, or the actual outcome? Thousands of our troops died, thousands of innocent civilians were killed or displaced from their homes, and the situation is still terrible with the rising of the new terrorist group ISIS (which has killed over 100,000 people). It could be said that the war led to much more suffering, and did not lead to the intended consequence of the people surrendering with minimal casualties. To a utilitarian, the actual results of an action are what matter, not what a person expects to happen. Somebody might say that the bombing was required, because not doing so could have led to Al Qaida doing more terrible things. However, I sincerely doubt that taking a more precise approach to attacking and dealing with Al Qaida (for instance, sending in specialized teams) rather than