In most cases, the suffering caused by the harvesting can balance out or outweigh the good done to the transplantee because the unsanitary conditions can cause horrific infections in the victim, not to mention the potential loss of function due to lacking the organ. Also, that stolen organ will likely go on the black market and be sold to a rich person, increasing overall suffering by extending their life and thus their exploitation of the working class. Even from a utilitarian standpoint, voluntary organ donation is clearly preferable, and organ harvesting is just as bad as it is in other philosophical frameworks. Absurdly simplistic analyses like this are nothing but a strawman.
I don’t think that solves things because I can just come up with a scenario where all these issues don’t exist, it’s clear what’s actually missing is rules like consent.
So, an example without these issues: someone is kidnapped (drugged, it was painless) and a surgeon without consent removes their kidney, to be used to help a dirt-poor dying child. No threat of infection, no hypothetical of it being sold to an exploitative rich person, etc. but we still have the problem the meme points.
The violation of consent itself is another form of harm, as we see in cases of r***. The scenario you proposed would still be causing more harm than the voluntary method.
Violating someone’s bodily autonomy causes harm but I don’t think consent itself exists in utilitarianism. “Dont do stuff to people that they dont consent to” is a rule. I think it’s clear that the mental anguish of having your extra kidney taken would be less than all the pain avoided by the child not going through a slow and painful death, and all the happiness they gain in the chance to a life they can now live.
Consent certainly can be a factor in utilitarian analyses, but it depends on the philosopher how strongly it is weighted. I’m not a strict utilitarian myself; my original point was to show that the premise of the meme (and in general, public understanding of utilitarianism) focuses too much on an extreme, comically oversimplified view of utility analysis.
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Bathtub half full?
Poor Shen will never live this comic down lol.
Utilitarianism in a nutshell
I prefer rules-based utilitarianism, which is the idea that we should create a system of rules that achieves the most good when followed. If we created a system whereby we rounded up healthy people and forcibly harvested their organs “for the greater good”, well, society would collapse as everyone flees to the woods to preserve their own life and organs. No farmers, no scientists, no doctors, no infrastructure maintenance, just global famine. And that would be a far worse net outcome than the current system that lets some people die prematurely due to lack of available organs.
A similar thought is Kant’s “Kategorischer Imperativ” (I don’t know how it’s called in English).
I’d say for individual based morality, I’d go with the golden rule.
I thought utilitarianism was “someone got their kidney stolen recently, but I’m more happy to get it than they are sad to lose it”. But maybe that’s overly cynical.
Always love seeing this one, never forget old mate and his comic
Original was about stolen bike.
No shock value :(
