hi this is Dr Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason iio where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught Philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated as and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong Learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube many viewers say they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on One Core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well this is another one of my core concept videos which is designed to help students and lifelong Learners understand how to apply how to make sense out of utilitarian moral theory so we're thinking mainly in terms of bentham's quantitative utilitarian Theory um not necessarily Mills qualitative utilitarian moral theory although that that could be applied to these things as well and the the types of examples and applications that I want to talk about in this one all center around um issues of health and you can look at these in terms of individual largely individual things you know if you're looking at it from utilitarian perspective of course you're not just interested in how it affects um the one single lone individual by themselves you want to see how it affects other people and then we got to think about larger broader societal issues as well so I'm not talking in this about uh a lot of what we call end of life issues or anything like that but I am actually looking looking at a few other other things here in this um so let's start out by thinking about taking care of oneself um does that matter from a a moral perspective is that is that an issue well from a from a rights-based perspective which is the way a lot of people tend to look at these sort of things um you know whether you take care of yourself what it is you put into your body what you do with with your body your time all that sort of stuff is you know it's up to you and as As Americans especially we tend to be you know very standoffish don't tell me what to do you know this is where you know this this is where my rights begin and and my um sphere of privacy even for certain issues begins a utilitarian wouldn't really look at it that way so from a utilitarian perspective the way that you would look at it is how is it going to affect first of all your own pains and pleasure not just for the short term but for the long term what kind of life is it going to lead to a life of happiness life of uh misery or somewhere in between are you are you preventing yourself from actually enjoying some happiness but then you know no man is an island as they say and very few of us are even Peninsula um how does it affect everybody else around you that's an important issue as well and if we're looking at it just on the individual scale you probably thinking about how does it affect uh your family that's a really big one but you'd also want to think about how does it affect your co-workers um how does health and the decisions that you make in terms of it affect um people more broadly in your Society you know for instance if you go on disability and you go on disability through something that was no fault of your own then you can't really talk talk about you know having made a decision about that it is a drain on on society's resources um and that's you know that's a big issue um from a utilitarian perspective any sort of drain like that is is going to be a problem um you have to come up with some sort of you know if you're going to expend public funds on something you have to be able to show benam would say um he actually does say this in a lot of places if you're going to if you're going to tax people to take take things away from them essentially by force by the threat of force which they interpret as as a pain you would better be producing some some higher Pleasures that outweigh those pains as as a result so if you go on disability because of your your lifestyle because you deliberately chose to ignore information about health and to pursue pleasure in a you know much more selfish um self-indulgent privately oriented don't tell me what to do kind of way well you know from utilitarian perspective you would actually be doing something wrong so let let's think about the the the things that we talk about the most these days when it comes to this so taking care of oneself um what does that involve diet is a big thing you know here in the United States we have a lot of uh choices when it comes to to food stuffs and um a lot of people don't realize how much choice we actually have because they they don't look into it or they don't want to invest the time and work that's that's needed in order to make some of the choices become live active choices and I think I'll talk about some of those issues in a in a separate video I'm going to kind of skim over that if you're eating junk food every single day or even if you're eating healthy food but you're eating too much of it well then you can you know you can become obese right um that's a problem from a from a health perspective and we we're in this nation now where so many people have made bad food choices over and over and over again and you know you can say well they don't know any better or um it's too easy to to acquire cheap you know uh empty calories or something like that and there's some truth to that that's something we can talk about you know a little bit later on but when it comes down to the individual if you know that something is unhealthy for you to partake in and yet you're doing it all the time you become responsible for that and how so again from a utilitarian perspective what's the problem with that if there weren't any bad side effects a utilitarian would say hey eat as much as you want eat as much crap as you want um sugar fat you know just stuff yourself full because we enjoy that sort of thing right so from the utilitarian perspective Pleasures are good what's the problem then well you know there's attendant pains that come with it I mean you can eat too much and we've experienced this sometimes that you know Thanksgiving eat too much and then you feel kind of kind of uh lethargic and your stomach hurts and some people actually like undo their belts and things like that um that's you know that that's not happening all that often but you know if you eat too much over time um your body doesn't feel good you start feeling certain pains it starts to take it toll on your organ starts taking a toll on your your joints um I know this in part from from my own perspective I'm overweight right I I should be about 50 pounds lighter than than what I currently am um so you know you might say well who are you to tell me about this well you know I actually know from experience there are pains that that come with you know having too much too much on your frame um what else you know a diet could also include um what you're drinking you know if you're drinking too much you know that takes an immense toll on your body because you know it's a poison that's why we like it because alcohol has these neat side effects and then we've also you know found ways to make it taste really great uh in a whole bunch of different ways but if you're indulging too much in it that has important side effects just from a health perspective alone that you know would would have a bearing not only on you but on on your family you know whether you're able to participate in activity um whether you're able to to you know provide as you ought to um how long you live you know I think most of us who like our family members would like them to live a long time and if if drinking or overeating or things like that are leading to people actually you know shortening their life then from utilitarian perspective um that that's a bad outcome if it's hurting other people in the process that's a bad outcome um you could also think in terms of example you know if you are you know in today's environment kids are getting a lot of bad messages about food if you want them to have good messages about food you got to serve them good food you have to serve them decent portions and and this goes both ways too by the way you have to serve them portions that are the right size for their developing bodies healthy food you know it's okay to have you know ice cream and candy and stuff like that every once in a while but not every single day day no soda at every single meal you know th those are are sugary drinks that's that's just you know sort of Common Sense and from utilitarian perspective it makes good sense and if you want your kids to actually follow through that that yourself you have to eat that way in front of them because it doesn't do any good to present them uh you know you enjoying yourself while they have to sort of live a life of austerity on the other hand this is a big issue for girls uh especially I think um some parents go to The Other Extreme and they starve their kids because they get so obsessed with weight you know this is a big problem I've seen this for um you know particularly for women but I could see men doing this as well um you know I think about wrestlers for example and their constant struggle to to remain at a certain certain weight class um but it but it's a it's a real live problem for girls you know um parents saying no you can't eat that much because we don't want you to get fat when there's no risk of the the child actually getting fat because they're they're exercising they're they're doing all sorts of stuff and then you know you know how you can tell a kid like that you put them down at the table and you give them as as much food as they want and they act like they're ravenous so you know that would be a problem exercise you know we all know exercise is important um again I'm I'm not a great example with this in part because I spend so much time doing sedentary occupations Reading Writing generating course content you know shooting videos like this this is not a very high high activity sort of you know process here I'm not moving around an awful lot um exercise is important if we're not getting enough exercise just from an individual perspective again you could say hey it's my right I can do what I want with my own body from a utilitarian perspective Ive you know the response would be well no not if it's actually affecting other people if you're so out of shape that you know it requires all sorts of uh accommodations to be made for you that cost other people Pleasures or cause other people inconveniences and pains then you're actually doing something bad from utilitarian perspective by not engaging in exercise you know I think for example when I go to uh Sam's or Walmart or you know Kmart or these other stores where they have these uh these um motorized carts you know that you can sit in and steer it around and I see some of the people that are in them you know and somebody's somebody might be you know have an oxygen mask and that okay that makes sense they're not supposed to be just walking around they're probably you know not doing too well right but I see people who look pretty healthy getting in these things with no sign of Shame whatsoever I mean I would be ashamed to actually ride one of those things so long as I'm actually able-bodied um I'd have to get pretty sick or pretty hurt before I would get myself on one of those in part because I think I do look at it in a fairly utilitarian way man if I do that I'm using up resources that that should be used for something else um what am I doing that I think I'm so important that I don't even have to walk around um probably actually would do us all a lot of good to walk around more wouldn't it medication you know again a lot of people don't like the medications that they have to take and understandable because some of them have side effects I'm thinking in particular of um you know medications that are that are prescribed for um psychological disorders um people go off their meds and that's a choice that they make um and once you do that there are certain things that are that are likely to happen and those can be measured out from utilitarian perspective in terms of the pleasures that they're causing one or the pains that one is avoiding but also in terms of the pains that it is causing other people or the pleasures that they are being deprived of as as a result um you know I'll just take a just sort of silly trivial example if um taking your meds while you're in the apartment next to me keeps you from waking up at 2:00 in the morning and thinking that it's a great idea to turn your stereo on full blast then um You probably ought to take your meds because when you do that now you're you know engaging in some pleasure for you you're really irritating me and probably everybody else around you in in the complex and if taking your meds would keep you from doing that that's a gain from utilitarian perspective you know when it comes to other meds um you know if a doctor prescribes you something and you can get it fairly cheaply and and for a lot of things you can get it fairly cheaply if you look at it in you know sort of broad perspective um if it's going to keep you from having more problems later on then you probably should do it preventative medicine you know what about uh things like stretching you know doing yoga massage you know breathing exercises all those sorts of things well again from utilitarian perspective for the individual person they probably ought to be doing those sorts of things uh in part because they're it's going to make them feel better but in part it's going to lead to more pleasures and less pains for the people around them you know if I have a bad temper and doing relaxation exercises each day helps me not to be a jerk to my co-workers then you know benam would say you should be doing those those exercises even if you find him hokey and irritating yourself for a while because you're you're you're making a better environment for people overall remember utilitarianism maximizing pleasure minimizing pain for the general community so I think that's enough about taking care of oneself now let's think about you know ways people don't take care of themselves like you know engaging in Risky behavior from a health perspective so you know what would this include well um I had a friend uh who who used to do backyard wrestling and they would do some crazy stuff I mean you know the moves that people do in in you know wrestling which we know are you know kind of kind of fake they actually require quite a lot of athleticism to do anyway though um these guys sometimes would do these things for real and they would do other things like you know hit each other with with light bulbs you know and get glass on each other and and they you know have barb wire and stuff like that and sometimes these guys get pretty messed up um one time the cops actually came and and uh you know gave them all I think a Stern warning I don't think anyone actually went to jail for that but why did the cops come because you're not supposed to be doing that you know you're not supposed to be fighting without a license why because we want to regulate that to make sure that people aren't aren't getting more hurt than than we actually expect well that would be an example of engaging in Risky behavior and you know if you're a single guy on your own who's got too much Wild Oats that he needs to sew um and you want to get yourself into a fight club or something like that I suppose you know from utilitarian perspective that would be less taxing you know less of a bad idea than somebody who's got a family that maybe he's providing for or that this is taking time away from or an injury will will keep him from being able to U meet the needs of um what else you know um engaging in in Risky sexual behavior um sleeping with anybody uh Under the Sun without any sort of protection from utilitarian perspective in today's setting really really bad idea right right because there's a lot of terrible diseases out there that are not too difficult to acquire and um once you've got them now you actually become a public health problem yourself uh from a utilitarian perspective um drugs you know engaging in in uh certain kinds of drug use well most kinds of drug use really when you get down to it um are probably going to be a bad idea from utilitarian perspective um so yeah why why is engaging in Risky Behavior a bad idea it's probably going to provide you a lot of pleasure that's why people engage in Risky Behavior there's actually you know some people get a real charge out of doing something wild um so that actually increases the pleasure which you know if you're if you're benam you say okay now we've got a higher bar that we need to meet but how many people does it affect how many other people the how many other people's lives does it lower the amount of pleasure that would would be the question he would want to know uh most of the types of risky behavior that we tend to say hey that's a bad idea tend to be types where however much pleasure the person is experiencing it tends to be worse outcomes for everybody else across the board and um you know we'd have to say the balance of pleasures and pains goes against that uh now here's two other really interesting things to think about about from utilitarian perspective going into work sick or sending your kids to school sick we all do this I think I know I've done this plenty um not so much with the kids but with myself um and in part it comes from uh on my part at least it comes from this sense of hey you know suck it up you're you're not so sick that you can't go in and you know do a lecture or grade some papers or something like that you know I'm I'm I'm in some sense a workaholic which probably from a utilitarian perspective you know is not taking care of myself right it's not balancing pleasures and pains rightly um should I go into work if I'm if I'm actually sick if I'm likely to um make other people sick as a result probably not I should probably take a sick day I you know a lot of this depends on the capacity to to actually exercise sick time and stuff like that I remember when I was back in in the Army a long long time ago we we had sick call but you had to be really really really sick before they'd actually let you go on sick call and they they'd put it to you like this they'd said well you can go on sick call but uh it's going to reflect badly on you if you're if you're not really really sick you know we don't want people doing that sort of stuff so we wouldn't go on sick call so we had injuries that we you know just sort of took care of ourselves and uh you know in retrospect it was a really dumb idea we have a healthcare system in part to try to keep people from engaging in this kind of behavior that that would make for a worse situation for uh for other people should I require students to come to class even if they're sick that's you know that's kind of a tough call too um if you think about it how much are they actually learning if most of their class is occupied with how bad they feel wiping their nose trying not to cough and bother the other students and thinking about oh I just want to get back in bed probably not that much I'm probably actually by requiring them to be there I'm probably actually causing them more pain um so I should probably have a more flexible uh attendance policy that I currently have sending your kids off when they're sick a lot of people do this in part because you know this is where we can actually measure things in terms of dollars and cents um If You're Gonna Keep your kid home you got to take a sick day usually or you got to find somebody else to watch your kid um or I suppose you could send them to to daycare sick but that's really the same same thing as sending them to school sick you know this is where you got to think about things in terms of how is it likely to affect other people if you send a kid who you know is sick in with a bunch of other kids and you know the way the kids behave you know they're not the cleanest animals on Earth um they're going to get other kids sick and that's that's a negative utility right it's it's causing a negative outcome for for other people these are you know fairly individual kind of things let's think more about big picture societal kind of things a lot of debate about providing health care whether as a society we ought to be providing Health Care to everybody what level of health care we ought to be providing uh you know what degree of choice we want involved in that all of those are things that I think could be analyzed from a utilitarian perspective but it would take a lot of work to actually do that and most of the people involved in these sorts of debates tend to quote the studies that back up their side or their preferred plan or something like that let's say we back off from all the the political machinations and buzzwords and things like that and we think just in terms of providing basic health care universally is that a good idea or is that a bad idea we we put aside the worries about is that going to destroy the insurance Market who's going to pay for this and all that let's say we just analyze it in terms of you know of a kind of government run option and we say okay it's going to be paid for by taxes and let's say we have actually assume and there's a big assumption I understand that that it would be fairly efficient right would it be a good idea overall so when we're thinking about things in utilitarian perspective we can think about current things how they currently are and what it would be like if we if we did that would it lead to an increase in utility a greater overall balance of Pleasures over pains if we in fact had Universal across theboard health not Cadillac Health Care you know where everybody gets you know everything that they need but a sort of minimum level across the board and then I suppose if you wanted better stuff you could you could spend your own money on that I would I would guess that from utilitarian perspective the answer would be yes that would in fact be better because the people who who tend to get pretty sick or who get caught in the system and unable to you know say get insurance providers to actually pay for things they're pretty unhappy um and you know people aren't happy when you raise taxes but they're not so much unhappy and and everybody can relate to the possibility that they're going to get sick or somebody else that they care about is going to get sick that it makes some sense I mean you know really if we were going to do that sort of thing it would have to be across the board so we would do things also like get rid of congress's uh free health care stuff all that they'd go into the normal system like everybody else and they would have to suck it up like everybody else so they'd have to have a real incentive to make sure that it's a livable system that there aren't a lot of there's not a lot of corruption and waste and all that sort of thing going on as a matter of fact I think from a utilitarian perspective you could actually make a really good argument that Congress people right we can do this for two things this is a digression but Congress people get really good health care for life and and most of them don't send their kids to Public Schools when they're residing in in Washington DC um so here's what I would actually suggest from utilitarian perspective small amount of people that are being affected but they have immense power they and their families ought to be required to go to the crappiest hospitals in their their areas and participate in the lowest level of healthcare available they also ought to their kids ought to be sent to the lowest performing schools in whatever District they're living in and if they're if they're spending a lot of time in Washington they ought to have to go there uh and everyone knows the Washington Washington DC public schools are just a nightmare uh for the most part so I think that would actually lead to some some pretty significant legislative change and and oversight about these sorts of things and really change the conversation not only for the Republicans but also for for the Democrats who are total Hypocrites when it comes to this kind of thing okay back to my my uh thing so providing Healthcare you know a good thing overall yes it extends life uh it allows greater capacities for Pleasures it it hopefully eliminates a lot of pains it does cost in terms of pains for providing those sorts of provisions and I think you probably have to build in something so that these you know can't just keep blossoming and blossoming the way that that they are um that leads to the second thing what about rationing or or triage you know you have finite resources available for dealing with sick people and you can see this in emergency rooms that's where you know triage is particularly important that's why you might sit for a long time in some hospitals waiting to get treated because the guy who's got the gunshot wound of the head is going to go ahead of you CU you know he's closer to dying than than you are with your your nail in your foot or you know whatever else happened you know the cut your thumb or got a concussion or something along those lines does triage make sense from utilitarian perspective I yeah I think it makes complete sense from utilitarian perspective what you're doing is you're identifying where the greatest payoff in terms of spending resources which is a loss are going to come and then you're dealing with that and then the other things you're sort of arranging in in order of priority based on you know what your your ratio of of good outcome is to investment of resources um rationing when you have Universal healthc care you do have to have rationing you can't provide everything to everybody I mean you have rationing one way or the other not everybody's getting everything it's just a question of how do you actually a portion the rationing is some sort of rational Fair procedure or is it just sort of halfhazard whatever you know ends up falling out you know or is it done according to who knows who you know some sort of corrupt process does rationing make sense from utilitarian perspective I think yeah it does again for the same reason that triage does um there's diminishing what we call diminishing or marginal utility for investing in certain kinds of things so you know plastic surgery for example there are some legitimate needs for plastic surgery somebody is in a terrible accident their face is disfigured great provide them with plastic surgery [Music] um somebody wants to have a nose job because they get made fun of for having a big nose uh I don't think that's quite as important I don't see that as quite you know the the payoff in terms of pleasures and pains somebody wants to have plastic surgery so they they can go to Hollywood and compete with the other people who have plastic surgery no that should be a completely elective procedure that they should have to pay a lot for uh and nobody else should be paying for it that would be you know an example of of ration let's move on there's a couple other really interesting issues here to think about disclosure of health risks we currently have this this set of you know procedures and laws that we put under this umbrella Hippa means that you can't really disclose much about somebody's medical records to to another person you can't even ask about a lot of things is that a good idea or is that a bad idea well think about uh some famous cases where somebody was sick Typhoid Mary I don't know if you know about her she was a food worker who infected she was a carrier of of you know terrible disease and you can think about all sorts of cases like this where there's people who are carriers and um she was she was a you know a cork by by profession um she kept on doing it she knew she was carrying the illness but she felt she needed to work and they managed to sort of track her down and um eventually they sort of took her out of circulation but a lot of people got sick and the process if somebody's carrying a deadly disease should we reveal that to other people should the need to protect other people from getting sick and thereby experiencing pain displeasure um you know discomfort unhappiness misery even sometimes horrific deaths does that outweigh that person's right to something like privacy or you know to to not be um looked at in a in a certain way let's say you know there's a social stigma about a lot of diseases well you know from a utilitarian perspective at least if we're looking at it in quantitative utilitarian terms I think that there's a good argument for publicly disclosing at least certain kinds of diseases maybe having alerts you know maybe for people who are engaging in RIS behavior and have diseases as a result you know certain venial diseases or you know kinds of hepatitis from drug use or things like that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for other people to to know about that um again You' have to weigh you know like if the stigma is particularly high that might actually be enough to say well no the displeasure caused by that and you know the social disruption caused by that and the other displeasures following from that would outweigh the the the uh other you know displeasures that would be caused by by putting people at risk um inoculations a lot of people don't like inoculations because they're worried that um you know there's connections to autism or to other other risks and you know really if the if the um if they wanted to put that stuff to bed they probably ought to do more studies and uh the doctor that are on one side ought to not be quite so condescending to the doctors and the parents and people like that on the other side I don't have a dog in that fight myself um I'll tell you my kids got got inoculated I don't have any problem with that I don't have any problem with inoculations because I was in the military and I had to be inoculated against all sorts of things um but I can understand the argument that um you know we have we have to look at what the the the the risks are in inoculations there are some risks some people do get affected badly by them um what are the tradeoffs think about you know something like uh that was a big problem just several Generations ago polio if you know anybody who's actually had polio and I've known some people in my my parents Generation Um it's horrible it it really did a number one that lasts the entire person's life it's disfiguring um it was eliminated almost entirely by using inoculations by wiping the disease out um from utilitarian perspective the amount of misery or unhappiness that's prevented by inoculations outweighs the even certain risks that some people are going to get sick from it if the number over here is much much greater of the total pleasure allowed or you know the misery that's prevented in comparison to the small amount that's coming from the people who do get sick this outweighs that antibiotics another big issue these days way too many people taking way too many antibiotics we see what the effects are um antibiotic resistant bacteria and um that was a bad you know bad idea it was a lot of individual decisions that led to a a overall structural problem that now we have to we have to find some way to deal with now we've got some antibiotic um super bugs out there and we're going to have to figure out how we're going to deal with that and you know the answer isn't more antibiotics uh because they're antibiotic resistant we're have to find some way to deal with that um from a utilitarian perspective you you could have made an argument back then that antibiotics ought to be somewhat um Limited in their application and use nothing like the massive you know use them for everything kind of regime that we've had over the last 20 years um it's too late now unfortunately so that's a retrospective last one I'll talk about quarantines uh again that would be very similar to this disclosure of health risks or inoculation when people get sick uh and they've got some sort of you know highly contagious um highrisk high damage kind of disease should they be quarantined now think about it this way if you quarantine people they are probably not going to be getting good health care they are probably not going to have a very good quality of life imagine quarantines like the old days where they just put a cordin around the area and anybody who tries to get get through they shoot you know that's what what used to happen in the old days or you get stuck on a ship somewhere and um you're on your own see who dies who doesn't meanwhile everybody on the outside is kept more or less safe is that okay to do from a utilitarian perspective and the answer is yes if you're preventing much greater harm from an outbreak that would take place place in the general population by confining say to a city you know think about Albert kamu is the plague they quarantine an entire city because Bubonic plague breaks out that's better than the whole world getting it or even the rest of the country getting it isn't it you're preventing a lot of harm by imposing some harm on some people the question though is not whether you don't impose harm on anybody it's whether you impose harm on this population here which is much smaller or whether you allow harm to occur to a much larger population from a utilitarian perspective that's a pretty easy one to address the answer is yes utilitarians would be for quarantines so um you see there's a lot of applications for utilitarianism to these sort of health issues um both individual and societal I think it's a a particularly useful way uh not the only way of course again I am not myself a utilitarian I'm actually a virtue ethicist um but I think it's a useful way for thinking our way through some of these these uh health issues that we are are facing these days uh sometimes in our daily lives sometimes in in crisis or in in terms of politics and Society