A man steals from a grocery store in order to feed his starving family. Which of the following best expresses the utilitarian principle in evaluating this situation?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The prompt presents a scenario and asks for the utilitarian frame of evaluation. Because the answer options are not provided, I will focus on the given answer and discuss how a utilitarian would assess it, while also noting the missing options.

Statement under consideration: "His action is acceptable, because the higher social value is the survival of the family." This reflects a classic utilitarian calculation: the action is judged morally permissible if it leads to the greatest overall good, here prioritizing the family’s survival as the higher value.

Why this aligns with utilitarian reasoning: Utilitarianism assesses actions by their consequences and aims to maximize overall welfare or happiness. If feeding the starving family prevents extreme suffering and preserves well-being, a utilitarian might argue that the effective good (saving a life, reducing deprivation) justifies the action, especially in a direct, short-term comparison.

Key supporting considerations in utilitarian thought:
- Consequentialist focus: the morality hinges on outcomes, not on adherence to rules or inherent rightness of stealing.
- Weighing harms and benefits: the benefit is the family’s survival; the harms include breaking the law and potential negative effects on the grocery store, social trust, and precedent.
- Potential for larger impact: a utilitarian would consider both immediate consequences and longer-term effects, such as how normalizing theft could affect suppliers, prices, and community norms.

Why this option might be challenged from a utilitarian perspective:
- Magnitude and likelihood of good: is stealing the only or best way to save the family, or could alternatives (charity, social support, borrowing, community aid) produce the same or greater good with fewer harms?
- Distribution of happiness: even if the family benefits, the store owner, employees, and other customers may suffer losses, reducing overall welfare.
- Rule utilitarian angle: a rule utilitarian might ask whether a general rule against stealing leads to greater long-term happiness than a case-by-case exception; if theft becomes a sanctioned tactic under hardship, rule utilitarianism could oppose it.

Potential limitations of this single-line justification:
- It may oversimplify the moral calculus by focusing solely on survival without fully accounting for broader consequences, rights, or the potential harm to others.
- It assumes that survival of the family is the highest social value in all contexts, which might neglect other important values such as property rights, fairness, or the duty to obey laws that prevent chaos.

Incomplete information note:
- The provided data lacks the other answer options, which makes it impossible to compare this option against alternatives that a test might present. In a full utilitarian critique, one would weigh all options in terms of their consequences and choose the one that maximizes overall welfare.

In sum, the stated option captures a core utilitarian intuition—that saving lives and reducing suffering can justify actions that otherwise seem morally questionable—but a thorough utilitarian evaluation would require examining the full set of possible actions and their ripple effects to determine whether this particular choice truly leads to the greatest overall good.

ISA201_D_202610 Final Exam Spring 2025

A man steals from a grocery store in order to feed his starving family. Which of the following best expresses the utilitarian principle in evaluating this situation?

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