For Pushing Large Men Off Bridges

[ This is a guest post by Matthew Adelstein, who, in my opinion, is among the best philosophy students in the world, possibly the best. He also has a blog. —mh ]

1 Introduction

Utilitarians say that you should take whatever action maximizes total well-being for everyone. This is intuitive in most cases; if you can help John a bit or Theresa a lot, you sh…