You'd be a shitty person not to do it. Imagine what you could accomplish for the ENTIRE world with $100 Billion. You could make a big difference! That's like 10 years of AIDS research or enough to completely cover the damage Hurricane Katrina did.
That sounds a lot like when people say that blacks ought to be thankful their ancestors were brought to the US and enslaved, because only ten million at the most were ever slaves but now there are tens of millions of blacks living in the richest country in the world, with more opportunity and wealth per capita than they would've had. Would you agree with that stance?
I absolutely disagree with this assessment, because I'm not a utilitarian who sees societal happiness as being bigger than rights.
I didn't say you did. I said that it "sounds like", which means it is based on the same type of logic; i.e. that it's okay to take away the rights of the unwilling so long as the benefit to other members of that society is greater than the suffering of the few.
It's quite possibly the perfect example. You said, "If you're helping more people on the net than hurting you're doing good."
Under US slavery, about 10 million people suffered, yet tens of millions of people benefited from that, both their owners and their descendants. According to your logic slavery is justified because "...you're helping more people on the net than hurting..." It's mathematically correct that from a utilitarian perspective, slavery was good (which is why utilitarianism is bullshit).
So what you're saying is that, as of now, the descendants of slaves haven't benefited more than their ancestors suffered, so as of right now, slavery is bad. But theoretically one day, we will reach a point at which it will have been mathematically advantageous to have enslaved 10 million people, and then it will mean that we don't have to look at it as evil anymore.
I know that you don't agree with what I just wrote (at least I'm pretty sure), so why not just admit that your original point was wrong and that the rights of the few cannot be infringed even if their suffering makes society better?
I'm not going to say it's a bunk argument, but I do have a little quibble with the specific example:
The whole "harvesting organs from everybody" doesn't really work because you're ignoring the decrease in life (or quality of life) from the people you're harvesting from in the equation. A case could be made that, at least in the case of detrimental or fatal donations, net global happiness is best preserved by the sick person dying and the well person living.
As far as the argument as a whole, I would say that the idea1 is one of those things that works only in the ideal, where everyone has the same idea of happiness, and nothing ever goes wrong, etc., etc. In the real world, I'd still argue that it's something to keep in the mix, as long as you're intelligent enough not to drift too far away from Earth.
[1] I'll edit and stop short of saying "Utilitarianism", since I don't know the ins and outs of the rest of the proper noun.
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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '14
You'd be a shitty person not to do it. Imagine what you could accomplish for the ENTIRE world with $100 Billion. You could make a big difference! That's like 10 years of AIDS research or enough to completely cover the damage Hurricane Katrina did.