The person who risk deaths to save 100 people is indeed more heroic than the person who save 2 people.
Are you saying there's no difference between 1 or 100 people?
Are you saying there's no difference between 1 or 100 people?
It requires a greater degree of selflessness to value two lives over your own than it does to value a hundred lives over your own. A fairly large number of people would consider sacrificing themselves to save half the world — that many lives lost is such a tremendous tragedy, it almost seems like an obligation. But few people would seriously think about exchanging their life for a stranger's — they'd say sorry, too bad, you got unlucky.
That's true. But the typical formulation for utilitarianism -- "if a trolley is hurtling down the track, certain to kill 5 people ahead of it, is it OK to divert it onto a different track if that will result in killing a single person?" -- is very difficult to talk someone out of.
The idea that minimizing the number of deaths overrides any absolute prohibition on taking a person's life is pretty much impossible to overcome. Hence my conclusion that utilitarianism is, or has become, the default mode of reasoning.