Why it's bad to kill Grandma

> sneak into your house at night and reallocate your organs for better uses.

Adding that one to my library of motivational phrases.

I don't think the author is talking about utilitarianism at all. They're talking about compressing their moral intuitions. They already believed it's bad to kill grandma, therefore "utilitarianism" must be beaten into shape to reach the same conclusion.

The fundamental unit of (classical) utilitarianism is good/bad sensations, not right/wrong actions. If you start by taking rightness/wrongness of actions as fundamental, you are very much not doing utilitarianism.

The grandma/surgeon examples do seem to suggest that killing grandma is good or dividing up the patient is good according to utilitarianism. That may or may not be right, depending on context -- who are the people involved, what do they bring to the table, what relationships do they have with each other and with people not mentioned in the story? You can fill out these details in ways that would lead "common sense morality" to the abhorrent conclusions also, or bite their own bullet and claim "the means justify the ends" somehow.

Stuff like this makes me think the entire field of ethics is devoted to stating the obvious in as many words as possible.

I enjoyed that article a hell of a lot more than I thought I would (which would also explain why one of my favorite courses was Philosophy).

And you see the absolutist Utilitarian argument he is making used in economics. For example, Larry Summers (yes, that Larry Summers) memo (when he was at the World Bank) justifying dumping toxic waste in developing countries since the life expectancy of people in developing countries was already lower. The argument being that it was better for someone who would only projected to make it to 50 years to die early than it would be if someone who was projected to make it to 75 years died early.

The memo

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:*

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

Note: The memo was written by Lant Pritchett and signed off by Lawrence Summers (who was the Chief economist at the World Bank at the time). They have both argued it was meant to be sarcastic but nothing at the time indicated that.