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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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Scenario: A person roles into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the [organ that can be lived without]. The shooter has the same blood type as the victim.

Question: Is it ok to take the organ from the shooter to replace the organ of the wounded person?

Utilitarian: You can take the organ from the healthy person in the waiting room, they are easier to find and might have been the shooter anyways.

@stoatherd provided a good argument against this reasoning. In such a society, healthy people would avoid hospitals.

Likewise, the current situation discourages the adoptive father from supporting the child or even himself.

I actually think the adoptive father should be encouraged to raise the child as his own, key word encouraged. Coercion activates the innate human desire (common in men) to resist. No penalty for abandoning the child makes the father feel autonomous and "in control" when he raises them anyways, even if there's a (e.g. social) reward. (It also gives him control over the wife, but she still has the option of leaving him; if you think it's a bad or unfair outcome, can you think of a better or fairer one?)

I believe that is called rules utilitarianism, and maybe all actual utilitarians are actually rules utilitarians, and act utilitarianism is a straw man.

Maybe the current set of laws truly has no philosophical or moral backing, and I was wrong to tar anything with association.

I agree with your solution.

I don't think there's actually a coherent thing that "act utilitarianism" is pointing to. Its conceit seems to be that you can do some kind of causal surgery and ask: "Assuming that there are no downstream effects of this action (beyond some arbitrary cutoff?), and there are no implications of me being the kind of the person to have chosen this action... is it the best action?"

So there's two problems with this:

  1. The distinction between 1st order and 2nd/Nth-order effects is arbitrary; choosing to cut off some effects but not others doesn't really make sense
  2. You can't separate making a choice from being a person that makes that choice.

On point 2, the rule/act distinction is confused in a similar way that two-boxers in Newcomb are confused. If, in the organ scenario, you make the choice to kill an innocent person to take their organs... then you are the kind of person to do that. Which means you live in a society that generates people who choose to kill innocent people for their organs. You can't carve out the naive 1st-order utility calculation from the implications of people taking that choice, any more than in Newcomb you can go "I'm going be a one-boxer so I get the million dollars... and I'm going to take both boxes".

Act Utilitarianism seems to mostly exist as a strawman for people to say "utilitarians would kill you for your organs", which is silly, because they empirically don't.

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