Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 40: Non-consequentialists Think You Should Do Bad Things

I, however, do not.

Consequentialism holds that you should do the most good thing. Non-consequentialists (foolishly!) deny this. But this leads them up to a really weird and counterintuitive implication.

Consider the organ harvesting case. It would clearly be fortunate if the person died of natural causes and then their organs were donated to save five people. In fact, it would be good if your arm was moved by a robot to kill the people and harvest their organs. Thus, it would be good if the action was taken, if you harvested the organs.

If there was a robot that was going to force your arm to harvest organs unless you pressed a button, presumably, on deontology, you should press the button. But pressing the button would be bad — it would make the world worse. So deontologists think you should do bad things sometimes — things that make the world worse.

So if you think you should do good things that make the world better, rather than bad things that make the world worse, you should be a consequentialists.

A related argument is the following.

1 If something is good, there should be it (E.g. global peace is good, so there should be global peace)

Thus, if an action is good, there should be that action

2 If there should be an action taken by you, you should take that action. Therefore, if an action is good, you should take it.

3 If non-consequentialism is true, you sometimes shouldn't take good actions. (Organ harvesting is good -- the world would be better if it happened, but you shouldn't take it on non-consequentialism).

Therefore, non-consequentialism is false.