The consequences or the forbidden act
On the axis: Criterion of right action · an act
Should an act be judged by its consequences alone, even if that means sacrificing one to save five, or do some acts stay forbidden whatever the cost?
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment The trolley problem:
A runaway trolley is hurtling down the track. Straight ahead, five people are working on the line and cannot escape in time. You are standing next to a switch: by pulling it, you can divert the trolley onto a side track. But one person is working on that track, and will be killed if you act. If you do nothing, the five die; if you pull the switch, one person dies, by your hand. You have only seconds to decide. A variant: imagine now there is no switch, but a footbridge over the track, and beside you a heavy man. The only way to stop the trolley and save the five would be to push him onto the track: his body would stop the trolley, but he would die. The balance is the same, one life against five, and yet almost everyone would pull the switch without hesitation, but would refuse to push the man.
Philippa Foot (1967)
Would you pull the switch? And what makes such a choice right or wrong: the number of lives saved, or the fact of causing a death yourself?
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Justification
Mill seeks to ground morality on a fact rather than an undemonstrable intuition: the only proof that a thing is desirable, he argues, is that people actually desire it, and what everyone ultimately desires is happiness. Thence the as the sole criterion of the right, and the consequentialism he opposes to moral intuitionism and to alike: he charges Kant with being unable, in practice, to rule out a universalisable maxim except by invoking the desirability of its consequences, thus smuggling back the very utility he claimed to dismiss.
Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.Utilitarianism, ch. 2
Utilitarianism (1863), ch. 2 (the greatest happiness doctrine) · Utilitarianism, ch. 1 (critique of the Kantian a priori)
Justification
Nothing is good without qualification except a good will: neither talents nor happiness, which can serve evil. If moral worth lies neither in the object willed nor in the consequences, it can lie only in the form of the maxim, its fitness to hold as a law for all. From this the is derived: act only on a maxim I can will to be universal. This is a deontology that refuses, against , to measure duty by outcome; the reintroduces the virtues, but as derived from duty, hence a small residual weight on that pole.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, section II
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, sections I and II · Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue