Would you kill a human to save a chicken?
It’s a good question. To me, it seems like it should be a difficult question. Even if I’m “supposed” to be a utilitarian, this seems like a hard call. I can see someone making a case for either, but I can’t see someone making the other.
If we’re being utilitarian relativist, I don’t see any good cases for it. If we’re being consequentialist relativist, I can make a good case. This one I can’t see.
….. I don’t think I could kill a human to save a human… :|
Well, the first thing to note is that in the scenario you described, the chicken is the object of the utility aggregation. The human is not. In fact, the only way for the human to have a utility comparison with a chicken would be for the human to kill the chicken. In your scenario, the human is saving the chicken, but the human doesn’t do anything to the chicken in the course of that saving. So it must be a benefit from the perspective of the human, which makes it a different sort of case.
The “benefits” that leonardo dicaprios cites as justification for killing a human being are fourfold:
(1) the fact that the being in question is not united with its human environment, namely, by being not fed, fumigated, etc.
(2) the fact that the being is in pain, namely that it is living in its own thick fluid.
(3) the act of killing is autonomy disintegration.
(4) the death.
