Lectures in the hall of arts today

Wednesday after class, Nomy mentioned that she wasn’t feeling well, and might want me to run class on Friday. I told her I’d be happy to do that if she wanted me to. Late Thursday afternoon, she called me and asked me to do that. It would be my first time ever running a college class. Alright! I felt a little irresponsible for not spending hours preparing for it — when my roommate had to lead a course last week, he spent five or six hours planning what to say — but I really didn’t feel like I needed it. I thought over some of the issues (what does utilitarianism amount to? what is Mill’s argument for utilitarianism? where does utilitarianism run counter to common sense?), and skimmed over a couple of passages from Mill that had been fuzzy in my mind. Total prep time: 20 minutes, between student visits to my office hours, the morning of class.

And then it was class time. The students filtered in as usual, and I was sitting there as usual (Nomy is rarely early). And then I surprised everyone by standing up and addressing them at 1:00, with no Nomy in sight. “Professor [name] isn’t feeling well, and asked me to lead a discussion session on utilitarianism today.” And then I did. I reminded them what the theory was and what it was about, and then broke them into small groups to brainstorm counterexamples. I walked from group to group and listened in, and they seemed to have a very good grasp of things, so after only about twelve minutes I called them back together and we discussed. They introduced their examples, and I explained what was good and what was bad and what was important, and they were lively and discussed one another’s ideas, and they laughed the *one* time I said something funny, and the comprehension seemed really high.

They came up with eight initial stabs at counterexamples:

1. One person thinks his life isn’t worth living and intends to kill himself. But another well-meaning person thinks that life IS worth living, and so prevents the suicide. I explained that this does not have the form of a counterexample to utilitarianism, because it is just a case of two people disagreeing about what will cause the most total happiness; utilitarianism would suppose that one of the people was just wrong.
2. The standard case of a doctor who has an opportunity to kill one patient in order to harvest his parts and save five other patients.
3. A person rescues a baby from drowning, and the baby grows up to be Hitler.
4. We torture a terrorist to get him to tell us how to diffuse the nuclear bomb in Manhattan. (At the very end of class, I took a quick poll: about 3/4 of the class thinks that it is morally permissible to torture in a carefully-constructed enough extreme situation.)
5. We force two gladiators to kill one another, which provides entertainment to many.
6. We have a society in which a small class of miserable slaves brings lots of happiness to their owners. (We had time to discuss this in some depth, and there was lots of back-and-forth on various factors: would this really be the BEST set-up? wouldn’t some of the owners feel sorry for them? etc.)
7. The funniest example of the day: two people are on a desert island, and one of them would REALLY enjoy killing the other one.
8. We live in a totalitarian utopian BRAVE NEW WORLD sort of society, where everyone is happy, but intuitively the world stinks. (I pointed out that this one was interesting in being specific to hedonistic theories; we discussed the logical structure of utilitarianism as a kind of consequentialism.)

I pointed out that thus far, they had focused on actions which utilitarianism judges right, but intuitions judge wrong, and so I asked if anyone had counterexamples of the opposite kind. One student suggested “confessing to the oblivious wife that you are cheating on her”, which I thought was a pretty nice example.

A few other topics that were touched on, but not explored in depth:

• How do we calculate the change in happiness for a person’s death?
• Utilitarians will favor laws, policies, and rules of thumb; they don’t tell us always to calculate utility.
• Mill’s utilitarianism is about actual consequences, but maybe a more plausible version would consider reasonably expectable consequences.
• One student suggested that the actual-consequences version has a problem with the ability to guide action: we don’t know what the consequences years from now will be, so how can utilitarianism help us decide what to do?
• One student suggested, against cases like the “it’d be fun to watch people kill themselves” counterexample, that we weigh some pleasures lexically higher than others.

At the end of class, students came up to me to continue debating points of philosophy. One student asked if I’d be running class every Friday. I explained that this was just because Nomy was sick, and the student told me that class had been “very good”. If I can get myself a decent job as a philosophy professor, I’m going to be a *good* instructor.

Oh, and ’cause there hasn’t been a girl update in a while: things are starting to look potentially interesting again. I’m going out with Audrey tonight. Stella emailed me a few days ago and suggested we have breakfast on Sunday again. Sara gets back from her vacation this weekend, and said she’d email me about getting together for Indian food. Roommate Ben is talking (one never knows how seriously) about trying to set me up with this brilliant and gorgeous student who was in Jamie’s class last semester. And new on the scene, Kristy, whose ad I responded to on CL. We’re having coffee tomorrow.

Today: buying blank DVDs for Buxton show transferring (Emily! Yeomen works now!!!!! You MUST see it!), going thrift store shopping with Stephen, Dan, maybe-Audrey, and maybe-Arianne, reading for Ernie, maybe working on my dream paper, and a date with Audrey (tentative plans: Mikado and ice-skating).