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#305 - Moral Knowledge

Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

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The Dangers of Utilitarianism

The danger of utilitarianism is that you can very quickly find because it's all about maximization, you can find these edge cases. And in a sense, moral philosophy operates like this game wherein you're trying to find examples that disagree with people's moral intuitions. I take this case of the rogue surgeon who has five patients on the operating table and he can go out into the streets, grab someone off the streets, butcher them in an alleyway, take their organs and save five people. So it just seems like a very easy case when you look closely at what the likely consequences would be but there are probably local cases where the situation flips.

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