Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 34: Should You Kill One So You Don't Kill Five?

A question for deontologists

Suppose you know that you’re a deeply morally fallible agent. While you don’t really want to kill a person now, you know, based on facts about your psychology, that if you don’t kill one person now, later in the year you’ll kill five people. In this case, should you kill the person now to prevent five future killings?

There are two options that can be given by the deontologist and neither of them are good. First, they can say that you shouldn’t. However, this seems unintuitive; if it’s one murder now or five later, of course the one murder now would be less bad. There is, after all, less murder done by you, to violate rights. The fact that one is now and the other is in the future doesn’t seem morally salient.

Suppose if you kill one person now you’ll kill A, while if you wait, you’ll kill A,B,C,D, and E. In this case, A will be killed regardless, so it’s just a question of whether B,C,D, and E all get killed. There is literally no benefit to anyone from not killing A. Thus, this option is untenable.

The second option for the deontologist is saying that you should kill the person to prevent five of your future killings. However, this gets unintuitive results of its own. In this case, the deontologist holds that you shouldn’t kill one person to prevent 5 killings. It doesn’t seem fundamentally important whether the killings you prevent are carried out by you or by other agents.

If you should kill A to prevent yourself from killing A,B,C,D, and E, then you should kill one person to prevent someone else from killing A,B,C,D,E, and F. After all, the only difference between the scenarios for the potential victims is that in the scenario wherein you’re preventing your future murders, F still gets murdered by someone else, while F doesn’t in the other case. However, the deontologist doesn’t think you should kill one person to prevent someone else from killing A,B,C,D,E, and F.

Thus, the argument is as follows.

1 If you should kill one to prevent five killings done by yourself in the future, you should kill one to prevent six killings done by other people.

2 You should kill one to prevent five killings done by yourself in the future

Therefore, you should kill one to prevent six killings done by other people.

3 If deontology is true, you shouldn’t kill one to prevent six killings done by other people.

Therefore, deontology isn’t true.

This objection also plausibly works against virtue ethics, which holds that your primary aim should be being a good person, rather than bringing about good consequences. It seems like we have reason to also accept

4 If virtue ethics is true, you shouldn’t kill one to prevent six killings done by other people.

Therefore virtue ethics isn’t true

Now, given that the rival views are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, we have reason to accept

5 If virtue ethics and deontology are both not true, then consequentialism is true

Therefore, consequentialism is true. Just as I suspected.