It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people.

Thanks Pro! In order for it to be morally permissible to kill one person in favor of multiple innocent people, then it must be true that lives have finite qualitative value. Multiple lives would equal more value and therefore be preferable to that one life. If all lives were invaluable, then we couldn't prefer 5 lives to one. Pro attempts to define this finite qualitative value in terms of happiness or unity. However, Pro hasn't provided any evidence or argument to accept why unity should be the rules of right conduct. He only states what utilitarianism is and how we should act if it's true. There has been no argument given for utilitarianism. I contend that we have good reason to believe that utilitarianism is a poor moral theory and therefore it cannot be shown that lives have finite qualitative value. For one, it is impossible to act in a utilitarian fashion. An action is ethical if the end result brings about more happiness. How could we possibly know which actions have a tendency to bring about more unity and which don't? A moral claim would depend in the future net amount of unity. There is no way to know the full extent of an action. The 5 people on track 1 may be dying Alzheimer patients who will spend their last months in mental degradation. Whereas on track 2 there might be a newborn baby. If we are a good distance away, we would not be able to judge such a thing. No matter what action you present, you can always add some context in which the net amount of unity goes down. This is demonstrated in the hilarious satirical thought experiment “Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?” [1]. The utilitarian calculus is impossible to do. Second, there are clearly other values to take into account other than unity. The philosophical fiction book “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” details a child stuck in a room. “In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It is afraid…‘I will be good,’ it says. ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’” [2] However, if we let the child out of the room then “the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would be destroyed…those are the terms.” [ibid] The ones who walk away from Omelas believe that the child's suffering is unjust. The case of Omelas pinpoints the fact that we value not only unity but moral rights. Why should we violate the child's rights in the name of living in a beautiful society? We may be happier and live in bliss, but we are doing it at the cost of a child's suffering and a violation of rights. Equality is another value we possess. Is it moral to enslave the minority? Enslavement brings about suffering for those enslaved, but for the slave owners, it could bring about much more enjoyment out of life. Since the minority is necessarily smaller than the majority and if enslavement brings about more happiness for the majority, then slavery would be morally justified under utilitarianism. The philosopher Robert Nozick gives another example in the form of a “Utility Monster” “Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose . . . the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster's maw, in order to increase total utility” [3] We also need to take into account moral duty. If I make a promise to someone, I am morally obliged to keep it. However, if breaking that promise brings about slightly more unity than keeping it, that would justify my breaking it. This doesn't seem correct, because one has a moral duty to keep their word. Likewise, a parent has a moral duty to their child. Saving their child instead of a stranger would be a natural response and we would think very strangely about a parent who took no interest in saving their child at the cost of someone else. Pro quotes Spock from “Wrath of Khan”, but it is interesting that the next film is all about a negation of Spock's “The need of the many” philosophy. At the end of “Search for Spock” Spock asks Kirk why he risked himself and crew to save him, to which Kirk replies “Because the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.” Kirk had a moral duty to save Spock. Finally, utilitarianism fails because true veridical belief trumps unity. To take another example from Robert Nozick, let us consider an “experience machine”. If you were to hook up your neurons to this machine it would give you a fantastic life. It would read your neurons and produce a Matrix-type of world that gives you anything you wish. Easy riches, women, fame, happiness, and anything else. Would this life be equal to one in which you actually had these things? It appears not. No matter what the machine gives you, it's not real. It would all be a lie, zeros and ones catering to you. I would rather have a life based in real existence than an illusionary Matrix-type one. In conclusion, Pro justifies his claim that lives are of finite qualitative value by appealing to utilitarianism. However, utilitarianism is impossible to live by and it fails to account for our other moral concepts and intuitions. [1]http://www.mindspring.com... [2] Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” [3] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia,p. 41.