| | Imagine three plans for a moral agent to achieve a goal. Each plan will cost the moral agent the same effort and will yield the same return, except: Plan A will neither help nor hurt anyone else; Plan B will yield a side effect -- it will make, say, 10 strangers better off; and Plan C will yield a side effect also -- it will make say, 20 strangers better off.
Perhaps some Objectivists will say it's okay to shrug away from the 10 or 20 strangers, that it makes no moral difference whether the moral agent chooses any of those plans over the others. But I suspect most Objectivists will say it's morally preferable, perhaps in the name of good will or benevolence, to go with Plan B or C and make some number of strangers better off.
I suspect that Objectivists will also not remain morally neutral when choosing between Plan B and C. I suspect most will go with the *utilitarian* solution and opt for Plan C (make 20 strangers better off). I would take this as Objectivists adopting utilitarianism as a secondary philosophy. On the one hand this seems counter-intuitive because Objectivism obviously rejects utilitarianism, but on the other hand, maybe it's kosher because it entertains utilitarianism merely as an auxiliary philosophy, something peripheral to the big kahuna.
Jordan
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