Oddities abound here with Bentham's original request, the rather awful 'smoking' of his head, and the auto icon itself. I once took a wee pilgramage to see it, and it is just odd. But now we have the head in 'What It Means To Be Human', and this attempt to see if he may have been autistic.
I often feel we like our categories too much, that it's simple to give something a name and it can be dealt with. Maybe Jeremyb was just himself. I can see the attraction in the theory. Utilitarianism has in certain forms a practicality that we might want to distance ourselves from. There is a resonance in some of what was represented as Vulcan thought in Star Trek in the needs of the many outweighing the few or the one. Now in a case of self sacrifice, there feels to me a pull for that but in any example of the trolley problem, my instinct is not to put the one in jeopardy they weren't.
Of course utilitarianism with its Felicific Calculus and happiness calculation seems different to a needs based approach, and is IMO better in that it looks at the individuals motivation much more and recognises that that we are all different (even though we may all have to fuck off in the same way).
That all calculations like this are doomed by our limitations, has always been problematic and yet it's not just a prescriptive approach, it also is about how we react as observation. My distrust of my own internal calculator is part of my pacifism, even while I recognise that it us in some ways a cop out. That seems to me to show though that all moralities are simplistic heuristics that are dully unaware of most of the inputs. Even a simple rule like First Do No Harm is impossible to begin following in the first three seconds of awareness when we wake.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/jeremy-bentham-head-autism-testing-exhibitionhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
