Yeah I remember hearing about this and being similarly appalled. I get it. The US really wanted to kill Bin Laden. But the manner in which they did it is sickening.
The ends cannot justify the means.
The ends cannot justify the means.
Oh they absolutely can in an utilitarian sense. But a basic utilitarian argument would tell that jeopardizing an entire region's vaccine rollout program to get revenge on some asshole already living the rest of his life out of a hole was not worth it.
Is that good reasoning? No.
Is it what some humans will do? Yes.
Then they aren't being utilitarian because they are not including the risk into their cost calculation.
Or at least not a good one. Definitely not "any"
edit:
Oh I see this now > who wanted to do the op
Yeah any person can make any false argument to justify a conclusion they wanna reach. You don't have to be utilitarian for that. Just unethical.
Sure they are.
They just estimate the risk much lower than you do.
You have no way to know who's right for sure.
Maybe they legitimately have found a really low-risk way to massively increase utils by cheating / mistreating a few people.
I don't know of a way to protect utilitarian systems from such conditions.