Zombies Take 3

That's right, zombies again. As you may have guess by now zombies will be a recurring theme in B4YB. It seems only fitting given the title.

Today we're going to get a little more philosophical, but don't worry there will still be zombies. I would like to discuss utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a more or less a code of ethics, and could be used as a possible economic model. An action is deemed moral if it causes the greatest utility between other possible actions. Most people choose to define utility here as happiness or pleasure. This makes it easier to understand if an action is moral or not. The moral action becomes the one that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering.

So far, utilitarianism seems great. It is hard to say that maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering could ever be a bad thing. That is until we include zombies. You see zombies enjoy brains. Zombies enjoy brains a lot. To make a zombie happy involves making someone suffer. However, as long as the zombie receives more happiness than the person receives suffering, utilitarianism would require zombies to munch on some brains. Even this isn't that problematic. Sure it's bad, but you will always have a few bad eggs in every society. Some people will want to argue that the bad eggs have more justification here, but I'm not sure that is something to worry about. Adding a layer of law on top of a code of ethics is something common to most societies in modern times and there is no reason we could not do it in this case.

The real problem comes when we look at one of the assumptions of utilitarianism and then think about zombies. The assumption is that each person will derive less and less utility as they consume more resources. So the first time someone consumes a piece of bread because they were very hungry they receive a certain amount of utility. That becomes less and less for each subsequent piece of bread they eat until it reaches a point where no utility is gained from a piece of bread followed by negative utility (likely vomiting a lot of bread). The problem is zombies do not derive less utility from their second brain than from their first. The brains prolong their undeath so it is possible to argue that they derive more utility the more brains that are eaten. This turns zombies into Robert Nozick's utility monster. In order to have maximum possible happiness in the world all brains must be eaten by zombies. This just is not an acceptable outcome. Utilitarianism seems to JUSTIFY a zombie apocolypse. Not good for us.

What do you guys think? Is utilitarianism a good moral system or not? If it isn't, is there a better moral system you could suggest?


Sources:
Utilitarianism by John Stewart Mills
Utility Monster by Robert Nozick (wikipedia link)