Week 3 Assignment
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Apr 3, 2024
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While terrorist attacks like the one that happened on September 11th, 2001, are rare, they present us with an important ethical question, that itself presents us with a moral controversy. This case study will wrestle with the idea of if it is moral to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet to prevent it from harming more people. We are left with a simple yet difficult ethical question, is it moral to shoot down a hijacked airplane? Reflecting on philosophical texts and theories can
help our understanding of philosophical theories and how they apply to our ethical questions. I will give an overview of utilitarianism, its theories, core principles, and philosophers, and explain and apply utilitarianism to the central moral controversy of the central ethical question in
this paper.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, four passenger jets were hijacked by nineteen islamic terrorists. American Airlines flight 11, 77, and Unites Airlines flight 175, 93 were targeted for hijacking. The islamic terrorists used box cutters to attack and disable the crews of the four flights. One plane crashed into the World Trade Center North Tower and plane crashed into the South tower, collapsing them both. A third plane crashed into the pentagon. The fourth plane was partially retaken by passengers and crashe din a field in Pennsylvania. The key planner
of the attack was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid joined the muslim brotherhood at 16. He went to school at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in the United States. Khalid met Osama Bin Laden in 1996 and presented he operation that would eventually become the 9/11 attacks. The leaders of the plot ran the operation from Hamburg Germany and soon to be 9/11 hijackers to flying lessons in the United States.
The central moral controversy of this study is one that people have had to make throughout history. In World War II the German armed forces used a encrypted code to transmit orders and information to its forces. It was dubbed the enigma code (Sebag-Montefiore, Pg. 1,
2001). If the Germans knew the allies cracked the code, they would change it. This in turn saw the allies allow attacks on their forces. In their eyes this action was the greater good, because in the end knowing the code would eventually save more allied lives than it cost. An example provided in How Should One Live: An Introduction to ETHICS & MORAL REASONING
(Thames, Ch. 3 Going Deeper, 2018) provides a useful experiment to help grasp this moral controversy. Imagine a train is coming. You have control over the switch to change what track the train is going to go down. If the Train travels down track A is will run over and kill one person on the tracks if the Train travels down track B will kill 10 people on the tracks. The ethical question we arrive at is if it is moral to kill a person to save many more innocent lives? The philosophical text that I will reflect on in this paper is a paragraph on utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill.
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded- namely, that pleasure, and
freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. Mill, J.S. (1863).
This text theorizes that utilitarians view that actions are right, or moral based on the number of positives they generate and negatives they decrease. An action with the least negatives and greatest positives would be the right decision. It also states that the reduction of negatives and the increase of positives is the foundational desired outcome and that the action itself can create the positive or the action you are taking is meant to be a means at which to promote positive results and reduce negative results in the end. When beginning reading John Stuart Mill it was initially overwhelming. The language he uses seems unduly complex. After multiple reading to myself and privately out loud you start to see that he is conveying something very simple. Things
are good or bad depending on the portion of good or bad generate. It helped me to write down his
main points in more common wording and grammar after I completed a few read throughs. This allowed me to better comprehend and visualize Mill’s points.
Jeremy Bentham was the creator of the ethical theory of utilitarianism in the 1700s. He developed a value for happiness in which he labeled hedonism (Thames, Ch. 3.1, 2018). Using this value, one could theoretically weigh actions to see if they were good or bad based on the amount of pleasure or pain that came of that action. This form of utilitarianism is called hedonistic utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill refined and added to the Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism in 1861 (Thames, Ch. 3.1, 2018). Mill offered thorough defenses to common objections utilitarianism received. In addition to Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism there are two other varieties of utilitarianism worth considering in the case study: act and tule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism is what I have been discussing so far through this paper. Actions, inactions, decisions, etc. are morally good or morally bad based on their net positive gain (Nathanson, 2023). Nathanson describes rule utilitarianism in his article Act and Rule Utilitarianism as
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According to rule utilitarians, a) a specific action is morally justified if it conforms to a justified moral rule; and b) a moral rule is justified if its inclusion into our moral code would create more utility than other possible rules (or no rule at all) (Nathanson, 2023).
Under this view murder for any reason might not be justified because it doesn’t conform to a justified moral rule and would not create a positive net gain (utility) if
included in our moral code. To reiterate the foundation utilitarian principle is an action is good if it creates the most amount of pleasure, happiness, positives, or reduces the opposite i.e., pain to the greatest number.
Lastly, let’s pose a theoretical ethical question and apply utilitarian principles to it. You are stationed at the international space station with four other astronauts. You also happened to oversee the station’s crew. A problem occurs that
requires immediate evacuation of the station. However, one person must stay behind and launch the escape pod. Ted and Jane are the only two people that know
how to launch the escape pod. Ted is single and lives alone, Jane has a spouse, four
kids, two dogs, and runs the children’s ministry at her local church on Sunday. If you were an act utilitarian the decision on who would stay would be a simple one. It would be the morally right decision to let Ted stay and die to save you and the other three astronauts. Because that decision produces the most positive outcomes
for the greatest number or simply put the most utility. Ted’s death is terrible but he is one person with no one back on Earth that relies on him. His death saves four
people and allows Jane to go home to her spouse, children, and children’s ministry.
Her death produces far more unhappiness, pain, and negative outcomes. This decision to sacrifice Ted has a greater net utility and because it produces a greater
net utility the action is morally good.
The core principles of utilitarianism are straightforward. The morality of something depends on the net positives “utility” of its outcome. The moral controversy of shooting down a hijacked passenger plane lends itself to analysis using by utilitarianism. This case study at its core is picking the lesser of two evils. In the case of the September 11
th
, 2001, the killing of two hundred passengers or letting 3,000 die when it could be prevented. This case also provides an opportunity to discuss and challenge other factors of the utilitarian theory. An important question to analyze would be whether we could know if the passenger jets were going to crash in the first place. The overwhelming majority of hijackings
do not end with the same as the September 11
th
hijacking. Most end in almost no fatalities (Ranter, 2023). Armed with this information the utility and morality of shooting down a hijacked commercial aircraft is far less black and white. If the plane was intended to land than shotting it down would cause less net utility, less happiness, and a much more negative outcome. Here I will focus on putting myself in the shoes of a utilitarian that has the difficult responsibility of tackling the ethical question in this paper. Is it moral to shoot down a hijacked airplane? I will attempt to apply this ethical question to two potential scenarios. Firstly, we have a hijacked passenger with forty people on board the jet heading towards New York, New York. The plane has only made one transmission since the hijacking. In
this transmission the hijackers stated that they were going to “bring down” the empire state building. In this scenario, I the devote act utilitarian would view this very simply. If the plane reaches the Empire State building more than forty people will perish. When we some up the net utility between shooting the plane down and not shooting it down we see that shooting the plane down produces the greatest gain (utility, happiness) for the most people and would be moral. Lastly, We have a passenger plane with 40 people on board that has been hijacked on its way to
Casper, Wyoming. The plane has only sent one transmission since it was hijacked. The hijackers say once they land in Casper Wyoming no one will be allowed off the plane until they are paid $100,000 U.S. dollars. If I follow act utilitarianism I might be killing forty innocent people for no reason. I then might make myself a rule that I will only shoot down hijacked planes if I knew they were going to crash into buildings. In that case I would be using rule utilitarianism. In this case shooting down the hijacked plan would not be the moral action to take.
Is it moral to shoot down a hijacked airplane? The decision to shoot down a hijacked passenger plane presents a difficult moral controversy. Reflecting on philosophical texts from authors like John Stuart Mill helps us understand ethical theories that apply to our moral controversy. Understanding the history and core principles of utilitarianism and its various varieties allowed them to be applied to the ethical question in this study. Ultimately, the answer to whether or not it moral
to shoot down a hijacked airplane depends on the form of utilitarianism you are applying to the scenario.
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Bergen, P. L. (2022, November 30). September 11 attacks. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/September-11-attacks
Nathanson, S. (n.d.). Act and Rule Utilitarianism
. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved
February 13, 2023, from https://iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/#H2 Ranter, H. (2023). Aviation Safety Network > Statistics > by period. Aviation Safety Network. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://aviation-safety.net/statistics/period/stats.php
Sebag-Montefiore, H. (2001). Enigma : The Battle for the Code. Wiley.
Thames, B. (2018). How should one live? An introduction to ethics and moral reasoning. Bridgepoint Education.