When presented with the famous thought experiment above, most people argue that morality requires pulling the lever. After all, five lives lost is worse than one lost. In his seminal 1977 essay, “Should the Numbers Count?”, Taurek asks: to whom? For each of the five people on the track, each loses his life. For the one person on the other track, he loses his single life. So, the answer to this question cannot be: from the point of view of each individual at risk of losing his life; each individual is at risk of suffering the great evil, i.e., the loss of his life.1
Well, the Utilitarian argues, each of the five doomed souls suffers an evil equal to that of the lone soul, but “it is a worse thing, not necessarily for anyone in particular, or relative to anyone’s particular ends, but just a worse thing in itself.”2 That is to say, objectively, in aggregate, the loss of these five lives is just worse. Such a conclusion is intuitive, but, as Taurek satisfyingly demonstrates, wrong.
To show how suffering (or, for that matter, pleasure) is not additive, Taurek posits a scenario in which a “large number of individuals experienc[e] a minor headache” or one person “experienc[es] a migraine.”3 Taurek concludes that “such a trade-off situation” shows that “we are to compare your pain or your loss, not to our collective or total pain, . . . , but to what will be suffered or lost by any given single one of us” (emphasis original): to that entity capable of experiencing pain and pleasure in the first place.4 I agree with Taurek when he describes the supplication to contemplate “what we the group, will suffer” as “at best. . . confused” and, at worst, “outrageous.”5
Taurek goes farther and demonstrates that it is morally permissible for some person A to choose to spare person B his arm instead of saving the life of person C. His argument is that, it is permissible for person A to choose his arm over person C’s life were person A person B, then it is permissible for anybody to choose thusly. For those that wish to deny this conclusion, you must commit yourself to one of two implausible things: you must believe it impermissible for you to save your arm over another person’s life or, if its permissible for you to save your own arm instead of another’s life, “it is for some reason morally impermissible for one person to take the same interest in another’s welfare as he himself takes in it.”6 This second commitment is particularly problematic for the Utilitarian, as taking as much interest in another’s person welfare as one’s own is the foundation of the moral theory.
Taurek’s case that “the numbers, in themselves,. . . should not count for any of us”7
is, to my mind, an airtight one. I’m genuinely curious what persuasive objections can be made against it.
Whether this actually is the greatest evil one can suffer is another debate entirely. We can safely ignore the answer to that question here; you can run this thought experiment with any other equal evil visited upon the participants—and Taurek does just this.
Taurek, 304.
Taurek, 308.
Ibid.
Taurek, 309.
Taurek, 302.
Taurek, 310.