Having just finished a graduate course in ethics, I found my mind keenly tuned to a question when Quillette editor Claire Lehmann raised it during a conversation with Jordan Peterson.  Lehmann said she found herself offended, once, when asked in an ethics-related class whether she would smother her own baby to death so as to prevent his or her crying and bringing torture and death to a group of people with whom she was hiding.

The philosophy tested in the example is Utilitarianism, whereby one tallies up the benefits and detriments of a given decision and does whatever creates the greater net benefit or smaller net detriment.  In those terms, the expected short answer on your ethics exam is that you must smother your baby so as to save the many more lives in the group.

My experience of Ivory Tower debates is too limited for me to declare it to be standard, but my experience has been that people arguing against such reasoning shift frames and turn to different moral standards.  That is, they salvage their intuition about what ought to be by disclaiming the validity of Utilitarianism.  I’m not sure that’s necessary or appropriate, however.  Rather, one need only adjust the width of the frame.

After all, the circumstances in which a mother might genuinely feel compelled to kill her baby in order to save others are very limited, which means that the greater good may very well be (I’d say, would certainly be) served by the principle that mothers ought never to kill their children.  We’re even better off if fathers are included in the rule, too.  Humanity writ large benefits when it is taken as an incontestable truth that everybody should have at least two people — the two responsible for raising them and preparing them for life — who will treat their intrinsic value as above all else.

One suspects such a world would be one in which it would be even less likely that a group of people would find themselves huddling in hiding away from certain torture and death.

Featured image by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash.