Peter Singer

So I don't think the utilitarian has to say more than, well, yeah, you know, we try to do that as accurately as we can.

Maybe we're getting some techniques for assessing it a little bit better than we used to, but that's the situation we're in.

Yes, you're right.

There are many such objections put to utilitarianism.

I tend to think that the answer to those objections is if you specify that this is a hypothetical example and we know that the slight happiness of the many is going to outweigh the...

greater unhappiness of the few or the one um and we know there are no further bad consequences from this then uh that could well be the thing that we ought to do now let me just add that we need in order to decide that that slight happiness of the many outweighs the greater happiness of the one we need to have a scale on which we compare suffering or unhappiness with happiness and

It's not obvious that that scale is one that runs in equal, thinking of it spatially, runs an equal distance from the neutral point in both directions.

In other words, I sometimes ask my audiences this question.

Suppose that a fairy says, I can grant you an hour of the greatest pleasure that you have ever experienced.

But the price you have to pay for that is that you'll also have an hour of the greatest pain that you've ever experienced.

Would you like me to grant you that wish?

And most of the audience says no.

And I conclude from the fact that most of the audience says no, that we think that the worst pains we suffer actually are further from the neutral point than the greatest pleasures that we suffer.

Sorry, the greatest pleasures that we enjoy.

Yeah.

So we have to be careful with these things about making one person miserable because maybe if we make them really miserable, that's going to outweigh a very large amount of mild enjoyments that the many are going to experience.

Yes, I think that is the standard view.

There are some people who've toyed with the idea of, if you like, a sort of declining marginal utility of utility itself.

Right.

And they do this particularly on the puzzles about population ethics.