Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 24: Another Other Tricky Issue for Other Accounts

Showing that I can write an actually infinite (not just potentially infinite) number of pro utilitarian articles

Suppose you stumble across a person who has just been wounded.  They need to be rushed to the hospital if they are to survive.  If they are rushed to the hospital, they will very likely survive.  The person is currently unconscious and has not consented to being rushed to the hospital.  Thus, on non utilitarian accounts, it’s difficult to provide an adequate account of why it’s morally permissible to rush a person to the hospital.  They did not consent, and the rationale is purely about making them better off.  

One might object that the relevant question is whether they would consent if they were conscious.  However, this seems to misidentify the correct action in this scenario.  Consider another situation in which the person injured is a child.  It seems obvious in this case that the person should be rushed to the hospital.  This is true even if the child wouldn’t consent if conscious.   

One might object that the relevant question is whether they’d consent rationally.  Yet as Parfit argues in On What Matters, what we could rationally consent to is the state of affairs that makes things go best.  This is intuitive in this case.  Whether the child could rationally consent to the action would seem to depend on whether it would be good for the child.  

It’s not inconceivable that a non-utilitarian could work out a justification in this case.  Yet this case is a clear example of one in which utilitarianism easily gets the correct result, while other theories need additional ad hoc stipulations.