All right, now, let's take the other part of the poll, which is the highest experience or pleasure? How many say Shakespeare?
How many say Fear Factor? No, you can't be serious. Really?
Last time, we began to consider some objections to Jeremy Bentham's version of utilitarianism. People raised two objections in the discussion we had.
The first was the objection, the claim that utilitarianism, by concerning itself with the greatest good for the greatest number, fails adequately to respect individual rights. Today, we have debates about torture and terrorism.
Suppose a suspected terrorist was apprehended on September 10th and you had reason to believe that the suspect had crucial information about an impending terrorist attack that would kill over 3,000 people and you couldn't extract the information. Would it be just to torture the suspect to get the information or do you say no, there is a categorical moral duty of respect for individual rights?
In a way, we're back to the questions we started with about trolley car and the organ transplant. So that's the first issue. And you remember, we considered some examples of cost-benefit analysis, but a lot of people were unhappy with cost-benefit analysis when it came to placing a dollar value on human life.
And so that led us to the second objection. It questioned whether it's possible to translate all values into a single uniform measure of value.
It asks, in other words, whether all values are commensurable. Let me give you one other example of an experience. This actually is a true story. It comes from personal experience.
that raises a question at least about whether all values can be translated without loss into utilitarian terms. Some years ago, when I was a graduate student, I was at Oxford in England and they had men's and women's colleges. They weren't yet mixed and the women's colleges had rules against overnight male guests. By the 1970s, these rules were rarely enforced and easily violated, or so I was told.
By the late 1970s, when I was there, pressure grew to relax these rules and it became the subject of debate among the faculty at St. Anne's College, which was one of these all-women's colleges. The older women on the faculty were traditionalists. They were opposed to change unconventional moral grounds.
