Contra Huemer on utilitarianism part 4 (alternatively, a post to get me out of jury duty)

Why you should sometimes frame innocent people (though not usually).

(Something Michael Huemer is very against)

Michael Huemer has another objection to utilitarianism, thinking that it justifies framing innocent people to save lives, which he thinks is bad. Huemer writes “b. Framing the innocent

You’re the sheriff in a town where people are upset about a recent crime. If no one is punished, there will be riots. You can’t find the real criminal. Should you frame an innocent person, causing him to be unjustly punished, thus preventing the greater harm that would be caused by the riots?”

Yes!

One first point that can be made is that in most realistic situations, one ought not frame people.  Thus we have strong reason to say no to the question of whether innocent people ought to be framed, even if we can imagine sparse situations in which it would maximize happiness to do so.  

Second, we can explain away our revulsion sociologically, by appealing to the revulsion which we rightly feel for framing an innocent person. 

Third, we can make modifications like the ones made in part five by making the people family members.  Surely you would rather one family member was framed, rather than all your family members killed.  

Fourth, suppose we could prevent either five murders from a lynch mob, or one innocent person from being framed and killed by a lynch mob.  Surely we should prevent the former.  One could appeal to the act omission distinction in this case.  However, we can modify the case to avoid this.  

Imagine a case in which a person (we’ll call him Tim) wrote an anonymous letter that would be delivered, which would frame an innocent person, who would be killed by the mob.  However, after writing and mailing the letter, Tim had a change of heart, and decided to prevent the letter from being delivered.  When he uncovered the stash where his letter was stored, it turned out to be in an iron box, with a robust security system, such that if two letters were taken out and destroyed, it would sound the alarm, and letters would be returned to their original location.  As Tim is about to take out his letter, he sees another letter, which has the names of five people on it, who Tim knows are being framed, and will be killed by the mob.  If Tim takes his letter out, he will not have framed an innocent person, and no one will be left worse off, as a result of Tim’s actions.   However, if Tim takes out the letter containing five names, he will prevent a mob from killing five innocent people.  In this case, it seems very intuitive to take out the letter with five names, yet it is very much like the earlier case.  When one is taking out the letters, it should not matter who wrote the letter.  Additionally, suppose one wrote the letter when they were asleep (sleep letter forging is considerably rarer than sleep walking, but not impossible).  In that case, it seems even more bizarre to take out the letter, because it was written by them, rather than the five that would save more lives.  

One could object that the cases are not parallel.  However, the cases have been designed to be identical in morally relevant respects.  In both cases, one is framing an innocent person to save five people.  The only difference is that one framing is dragged out over a longer period of time, and is done over mail.  Those, however, are not morally relevant differences.  

Fifth, let’s imagine another parallel case. A mob is planning on killing a large number of people, because they think that they all conspired to do the crime. They believe that conspiring to do the crime is especially horrendous (they take a hardline stance against conspiracies), so if they believed that only one person committed the crime they would beat that person severely, but not kill that person. However, that person would otherwise be killed by the mob, along with everyone else. Thus, it would be better for literally everyone if that person is framed. In that case it seems intuitive that you should frame the person to reduce the severity of harm to them, and save everyone else’s life.

Sixth, we can consider a case similar to the case I appealed to when arguing against magic rights. Consider the following case.

There are 100 concentric circles, the first with one person, the second one with five, the third with 25, fourth with 125, etc. Each person has 5 corresponding people in the circle outside of them. (Eg, person 1 in circle one corresponds to all five people in circle 2, Jim in circle 2 corresponds to Mary, Sue, Edith, Rampampam, and Gulac in circle 3m etc.) The first 99 circles are comprised of perfectly moral people. Each person has two options.

They can either

1 Frame an innocent person

2 Give the five people corresponding to you the options you were given.

However, the people in the 100th circle will certainly frame the innocent person. If we hold that it’s not worth it to frame an innocent person to prevent 5 murders, presumably we’d hold that it’s not worth it to frame an innocent person to prevent five framings. However, if it’s not moral to frame an innocent person to prevent five framings then it seems clearly immoral to frame an innocent person to give a perfectly moral person two options, one of which is framing an innocent person. Giving perfectly moral people extra options can’t be bad, because if the extra option is worse than framing an innocent person they won’t take it. They’ll only take it if it’s better than framing an innocent person. Thus, we have the following conclusion.

If you should frame an innocent person to prevent 5 murders, you should frame an innocent person to prevent 5 framings. If you should frame an innocent person to prevent 5 framings then you should frame an innocent person to give a perfectly moral person two options, one of which is framing an innocent person. However, if this is true, then one ought to take option 2 always, because they should not frame an innocent person to prevent 5 perfectly moral people from having two options, one of which is framing an innocent person. Unfortunately, if everyone takes option 2, we’d have to stipulate that a ring of perfectly moral people acting rightly would result in 5^99 innocent people getting framed, when, had they acted differently, only one person would have been framed. This is far more unintuitive than the utilitarian conclusion.

Morality doesn’t care about who takes actions—it instead cares about what actions are taken. Our intuitions are wrong. This conclusion may seem repugnant. Fortunately, Huemer already accepts the repugnant conclusion.

Non utilitarians will have to do better than this rights nonsense in order to demonstrate a decisive counter-example.