Posts Tagged ‘utilitarianism’

This month’s Sunday Assembly Leeds was hosted by Raj who arranged some excellent sections including Matt’s talk on how he uses persuasion at work (in legal battle between companies) and Jane’s Doing Her Best on working for a major high street book chain. She didn’t tell us which one it was, so it could have been any of them…

He finished up with a philosophical question on utilitarianism. If you can save five people’s lives by taking them from the body of one healthy person, should you do it? It’s well a known problem, though one that I take issue with. While it could be argued it sums up utilitarianism, I think it mis-characterises it.

I would consider myself a utilitarianism, and yet I would choose not to take the organs from the healthy man. Why? Because it then forces everyone to live in a world where they could be jumped and killed for their organs. That does not sound like the greatest good for the greatest many to me.

As usual we finished up with the most important part of any Sunday Assembly – the eating of the cake. The brownie was very good, as was the chilli chocolate cake. Disappointingly, I forgot to bring the devil’s food cake I have baked just a few days before. That’s the kind of issues you get when you schedule an event right on top of the Grand Prix though. Too many things to thing about.

Utilitarianism is a book by John Stuart Mill defending the topic. I found it rather wandering with little structure. This made it somewhat difficult to follow. Indeed, I am not sure I came away from the book with any deeper understanding than I went in with.

I did not help that I had the audiobook which is narrated by Fleet Cooper. He speaks with an American accent and calls the author “John Stuart Mills”, which made it hard to imagine it being the impassioned arguments of Mill himself.