Michael Schur

But the utilitarians also said that when we're calculating the amount of happiness or pain we've created, we can't just think about the one person we're dealing with.

We have to think about the fact that everybody in our society will now both know this happened and will fear that it could someday happen to them.

And since we've already seen what a terrible, stinky world I was trying to create, everyone in our society would become a little bit bummed out and sad by what I did, and so the total amount of pain and suffering I've created might actually outweigh the happiness.

I never got a straightforward answer, obviously, because Aristotle never wrote about, like, fender benders involving horse-drawn carriages in ancient Athens.

But at the very least, it sure felt like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill would be a little disappointed in me.

And it sure felt like Aristotle would be a little annoyed.

And it sure felt like Immanuel Kant would wave a disapproving finger at me.

And if all of the world's greatest philosophers are on one side of a debate and you are on the other side, you messed up.

OK, so I called the guy.

I apologized profusely.

I told him the entire story.

He was very kind and forgiving, which was an enormous relief to me.

I told him I had already cut him a check, which was in the mail.

I went back to the blog.

I told everybody.

The outcome?

Most people, not all, but most of them thought it was a pretty happy outcome.

I encouraged them to give money to the Red Cross anyway, because giving money to hurricane victims is a nice thing to do, and in the end, more than $25,000 was indeed donated to the Red Cross Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Don't applaud that.

That's the happy result of a bad event.