evildoers and the protection of the innocent to torture the child. The sum of the consequences would then be compared to the sum of the welfare considerations to decides whether or not to torture the terrorist and whether or not to torture the child of the terrorist. In some way, these things must therefore all be comparable and assigned weights; however, Utilitarianism offers no method of comparison. There must be some percentage of consideration given to the harmful precedent set compared to the amount of pain caused by the deaths, compared to the pain the terrorist or the child being tortured feels, compared to the harm society will be saved from by the deaths of people in the explosion, compared to the good that society will be deprived of by the deaths in the explosion. The overarching problem with utilitarianism as a method for decision making is that not enough of the necessary information is available and there is no scale on which to weigh the various considerations. Basically, the subjective utilitarian would probably consider that the deaths of many is worse than the torture of one. Depending on how much weight is given to the detrimental effects of the precedent which would be set by torturing the terrorist, the utilitarian could consider this to outweigh the greater pain caused by the explosion or not. Different people have different moral consciences, which dictate different actions. These differences will dictate where the person puts the most weight in the utilitarian considerations, since utilitarianism does not specify. Similarly, depending on how much weight is given to the detrimental precedent of torturing innocent children, the utilitarian could consider it to outweigh the pain caused by the explosion or not. In the end, utilitarianism does not help in making the moral decision. The information necessary to calculate all of the considerations identified by utilitarianism is not available. Furthermore, what is requi...
