Tutorial # 4. Consequentialism. Discussion Questions

After having read Singer, Peter “Famine, affluence and morality” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-43, try to think about the following questions.
An online version of Singer's article can be found HERE.

• Should we be doing more to relieve poverty?
• Why do we have a strict obligation to save a nearby drowning child but no comparable obligation to save faraway starving children through charitable donations?
• What are the differences, if any, between, Singer’s cases and the cases in the trolley problem? Take a look at the video.
• If we understood the psychology underlying our moral intuitions in Singer’scases, would we be any more sensitive to distant suffering? Why?
• What sort of consequences count as good consequences?
• How are the consequences judged and who judges them?
• Does great poetry create more pleasure than sex, drugs and dub?
• Why some kinds of pleasure may be more desirable than others?
• Is it better to be deluded but happy than be unhappy but for “real”? Why?
• If happiness amounts to the satisfaction of our desires, and some kind of happiness is more desirable than others, how can we try to educate our desires to reach that kind of happiness?
• How would you calculate the expected utility of an action? In your utilitarian calculus, should you take into account also the consequences that would affect animals? For instance, how would you weigh up your pleasure for a burger at McDonalds’ and the pain suffered by that animal?
• How is utility inter-personal comparison possible? Put it in English, how can you compare, for example, the pleasure of a sadist with the suffering of a victim? How can you compare the mental pleasure of watching a football match with the physical pleasure of having a freshly baked pizza?
• If it turned out that hanging an innocent publicly once a month dramatically reduces crimes, should we hang innocent people?
• Should we impose pleasure to others? For example, If putting LSD in water makes people happier, would you be justified to pour LSD in the aqueducts of Edinburgh?
• How would a consequentialist argue to explain why it is wrong (or right) to bake a stranger who agrees to be baked? Would it make sense such kind of consequentialist explanation?