ETHICS

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Essay on Utilitarianism Please type your essay in MS Word and send it to me by email attachment.  Please don’t use any other word processing programs, because I may not be able to open them. Your essay should be double-spaced, with margins about 1 inch all the way around.  I do expect that you will proofread your essay and correct typos and grammatical errors.  And I remind you about the policy on plagiarism. Answer the questions in bold.  And by that I mean that the questions are in bold, not that you have to type your answers in bold. Please include your name in the document name of your essay. The deadline is absolutely no later than Thursday, March 18th, at 12 midnight For Rule-Utilitarianism, the rule to tell the truth is part of the set of rules that would promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  Explain why truth-telling would do that.  But suppose that a brother faces this situation: his sister’s drunken husband, who has a history of violence, is threatening to harm her and demands that her brother tell him where she is.  For Rule-Utilitarianism, is it morally right for the brother to lie to the drunken husband? Be sure to state clearly what rules conflict in this case, which rule overrides the other rule, and why. This one is in the book, but I have added some details In the early 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram of Yale University conducted a series of social-psychological experiments to determine the degree to which ordinary citizens were obedient to authority.  Milgram had examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” – that they were just following orders from their superiors. The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”  On page 128 of our text, it reads: Volunteers from all walks of life were recruited to participate in a study that was called “a study of memory and learning.”  Two people at a time were taken into the laboratory.  The experimenter explained that one was the play the role of the “teacher” and the other that of the “learner.”  The teacher went into a separate room from which he or she could observe the learner through a window.  The teacher was instructed to ask the learner to choose the correct correlate to a given word, and the learner was to choose from a set of options.  If the learner chose the correct word, they moved on to the next word.  But if the learner chose the wrong word, he or she was punished with an electric shock. The teacher, prior to the test, was given an electric shock of 45 volts just the get the feeling of the game.  Each time that the learner made a mistake the shock was increased by 15 volts – starting at 15 volts and moving up to 450 volts.  The meter was marked with verbal designations: slight shock at a certain number, moderate shock at a higher number, strong shock, very strong shock, intense shock, extreme-intensity shock, danger, severe shock, and XXX.   As the experiment proceeded, the learner would gradually be heard grunting at the 75-volt shock, crying out at 120 volts, begging for release at 150 volts, and screaming in agony at 270 volts.  At around 300 volts, there was usually dead silence. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner was not actually experiencing any shocks at all.  The learners were really trained actors simulating agony.    The results of the experiment?  Milgram and his associates had expected that only a small proportion of citizens (the teachers) would comply with the instructions.  So imagine their surprise when they found that 60% were completely obedient and carried out the experiment to the very end.  Only a handful refused to participate at all once they discovered what it involved (or seemed to them to involve, since they did not know that the learners were actors).  About 35% left after various stages.  (This ends what you find in the text on page 129.) There is more: Milgram’s experiments were later replicated in Munich, Germany, where 85% of the subjects (the teachers) were found to be completely “obedient to authority.” Milgram himself said of this experiment in an article “The Perils of Obedience”: “The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.   “I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.  “Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.  “The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.” A good question is whether Milgram should have subjected people to these experiments.   Keep in mind that Milgram had a goal: to learn the degree to which ordinary citizens are obedient to authority. Given that goal, was he morally justified in terms of Rule Utilitarianism in subjecting people to this experiment to achieve that goal?  Explain.