An anonymous reader writes in:
I'm wondering if you're willing to do posts on teaching specific philosophical topics. I ask because I have real difficulty teaching utilitarianism. This isn't merely because I think it's false. I can motivate and defend views I think are false, and do it well. Rather, it seems to be something about utilitarianism itself which I just can't motivate for students. I can get them to understand it. I can get them to feel the force of major objections to it. I can even get them to understand and appreciate the responses that utilitarians have made (or could make) to those objections. But I just can't motivate the view itself. I've tried using real world examples that are supposed to prime our intuitions, I've tried using more fanciful examples to do the same, I've tried abstract motivations along the lines of Mill or Sidgwick. But alas. It always comes across as merely academic, as an entirely unconvincing attempt to defend a view that seems silly. And this is despite the fact that many of my students are sympathetic to consequentialist considerations. At this point I'm honestly thinking of giving up on teaching utilitarianism. So, my question: how do your readers teach utilitarianism well?
Great query. For my part, I think a series on how to teach particular topics would be a really good idea. While I don't have a ton of difficulty with utilitarianism, there are other issues I do trouble with: compatibilism about free will perhaps being the one I struggle with the most (for the life of me, I can't seem to get students to take it very seriously).
So, let me pose two questions to you all:
- What topic(s) do you have trouble teaching, and might like to see covered in this series?
- How would you address this reader's specific query about teaching utilitarianism?
I'm not sure that I have any particular tips for teaching utilitarianism. However, I happened upon an old Star Trek episode last night that seemed to me to offer perhaps one of the best examples to motivate utilitarianism that I can imagine. The episode was "The City on the Edge of Forever."
In the episode (spoilers follow), Doctor McCoy becomes delirious due to an accidental injection with a drug and runs through a time portal to New York City in the year 1930. Captain Kirk and Spock follow him but get there a few weeks earlier than McCoy does. During their time there, Kirk falls in love with an idealistic woman, Edith Keeler, who runs a soup kitchen and house for the homeless. Keiler, it just so happens, is also a pacifist–and after constructing a mechanical device, Spock learns that McCoy's traveling to the past changed the future in a surprising and devastating way. Spock learns that McCoy saves Keiler from being killed in an accident and goes on to help Keiler found an influential pacifist movement. Although this might seem to be a wonderful thing, it just happens that the pacifist movement leads the Nazis to win World War II–as the movement leads to an extreme form of appeasement that enables Germany to develop the atomic bomb and win the war. This not only results in millions of deaths and the Nazis taking over the world. It prevents the future that Kirk and Spock came from: a future where famine and human conflict have been eliminated (the future where the events of Star Trek take place).
The tragedy then is this: although Kirk falls in love with Keiler, Spock convinces him that she must die for the sake of the millions of others who would die and suffer were she to live. At the end of the episode, Kirk runs across the street to stop McCoy from saving her life, and Kirk breaks down wit grief. Although Kirk is emotionally devastated by his actions, the message (which the viewer is presumably supposed to empathize with) is that he did the right thing, choosing the (far) lesser of two evils on the basis of social consequences. Of course, other theories might be able to explain this too (and do so better)…but it seems to me a great example for at least motivating intuitive sympathy for utilitarianism.
Anyway, do you all have any other or better advice for our reader?
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