Hi Miguel,

Indeed – the real trade-off here is a few million lives with the amount of time that the threat works.

If they don’t keep blowing up the odd thing to make the threat of Dr Manhattan credible, then over time people will begin to defect – as the implied cost of doing so will be lower.

Hi Tom,

I have been told it is a critique of utilitarianism – but I didn’t really see it that way. It seemed like, if you didn’t agree, it was because you didn’t agree with the weighting placed on different aspects.

Ultimately, it illustrated one of the hard things about policy – having to make choices when all outcomes look sucky!

He sounds a lot like a social planner in the comic then 🙂

It seems to me like the film’s saying ‘utilitarianism sucks, but the alternatives are worse’.

The villain is never seen interacting with these people. You have a man pretending to be a god and a god pretending to be a man. It’s not so much about utility as futility.

Sounds very interesting – I might have to give the comics a look at some point …

The way I see it utilitarianism is a framework for discussing value judgments. As a result, anything that attacks utilitarianism is usually just attacking the value judgments made by the person using the argument – not the framework.

I agree that this makes utilitarianism in itself empirically empty – but I think economists only use it in the framework regard.

As a moral philosophy I’m under the impression that utilitarianism roles with some shady value judgments (such as weighting individuals equally). That may give the subject a bit more bite (in terms of providing conclusions) – but when value judgments are just given to us I don’t see it as the essence of what utilitarianism means to economists.