I shall argue that utilitarianism cannot accommodate a basic sort of moral judgment that many of us want to make, and that this inability counts against that theory.

Let us begin with an example. In December 1988, a bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103, from London to New York, caused the Boeing 747 to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing some 270 persons. It is hard to look such an atrocity in the face, so let us focus not on the murder of so many innocents, but on the news media’s response to the event. Journalists and camera crews were dispatched to JFK International Airport in New York to cover the response of those awaiting the plane’s arrival, and some of these crews were at JFK before many of the friends and relatives waiting for passengers on the flight had even heard about the crash. Unfortunately, as one commentator recounts:

One couple had only just arrived at the airport after most of the reporters, photographers, and television cameras had camped down near to the First Class Lounge which had been sectioned off. The woman approached a Pan Am official standing near the journalists and cameramen and asked why there was all this fuss. She was told that Flight 103 had gone down – her daughter’s flight. She then collapsed into a hysterical fit, screaming and howling for her baby, crawling on the floor, her skirt up, in what can only be described as the most painful exhibition of grief and rage for the death of her daughter.

The cameras immediately zoomed in on her for the duration of the fit: people were fighting to get shots of her howling on the floor….The footage went out almost immediately on CNN (Kieran 1997: 14–15).

1 What We Want to Say About This

What are we to say about this treatment of a bereaved mother? It is not on a par with the murder of the innocent, certainly, but most of us want to say it is still a shocking and inexcusable way to treat a human being. What is it, however, that the camera crews did that was so wrong? They did not kill, rape, coerce, constrain or physically harm the woman. They did not deceive, defraud, steal from or threaten her; nor did they cause the heart-rending scene that they beamed to the whole world. The bombers (or the Pan Am official) did that. As a first attempt, we may say that the camera crews behaved insensitively in exposing her during a terrible crisis, but that scarcely does justice to the situation. Some may also want to say that they intruded upon the woman’s privacy, but others will argue this is not obvious, as the bombing was an international event and the airport was a public place. Yet even those who agree that it was an intrusion on her privacy will think that this does not go far enough. Even when exactly the right words escape us we want to say that, in treating the woman in this way, the camera crews wronged her, or even violated her.

2 What the Utilitarian Cannot Say

Now, what can the utilitarian say about this? He can say, of course, that this behavior caused pain to this woman, her family and friends – if not at that moment, at least later. He can also say that this pain will be acute, complex and long lasting. He can say that the public and long-lasting record of this incident may add to the misery caused for this woman by the murder of her child. He can say all of that and add to it the claim that this pain and misery is bad. He can perhaps say that the camera crew’s treatment of the woman (hereafter ‘Mrs. V’) was vicious in a technical sense, in that it manifested bad character traits (traits opposed to his list of virtuous traits, the general inculcation of which would maximize utility).Footnote 1 He can even say that the television crew’s behavior was impermissible, assuming that their filming and broadcasting of the scene brings about a lesser balance of global utility, over the long run, than some alternative action open to them (which, for the sake of argument, I am willing to grant).Footnote 2 These are things that many of us may want to say, and the utilitarian can say all of them.

But notice: there is something that the utilitarian cannot say, namely that the camera crews wronged Mrs. V, that they violated her; indeed, that they wronged her in violating her. He can say that the camera crews caused her pain and that they did something wrong and that the thing that caused her pain was also the thing that was wrong. But he cannot say that they wronged her.Footnote 3 According to utilitarianism, moral offenses are offenses against global utility or right reason, or possibly against the totality of sentient beings, but never against individual victims, yet it is precisely this aspect of the action – that it is an offense against a particular person – that is highlighted when we say that this action wronged that woman.Footnote 4 In case the difference is not yet clear, consider the commonsensical point that, when we have wronged an individual, we think that an apology is owed to that individual. (Indeed, we think that an apology is owed to that individual even when, on balance, wronging them was the lesser of two evils.Footnote 5) But in cases where we simply fail to maximize utility, to whom should we apologize?Footnote 6 In the present case, the clear-eyed utilitarian must think it odd that we should apologize to the bereaved mother, since our failure to maximize utility is nothing uniquely to do with her. On the utilitarian view, even if the action is wrong, that fact has as much to do with its effect on other people’s utility as with its effect on Mrs. V’s. To suppose otherwise is to make the same mistake as the dim-witted student who complains to one particular teacher (out of many), ‘It’s because of your class that I’ve got a “D” average!’

3 Why They Cannot Say It

Initially, the utilitarian might respond that he can indeed give a perfectly good sense to talk of wronging, that there is a straightforward sense in which utilitarians can say that Mrs. V was wronged.Footnote 7 Since it has been agreed on all sides that Action1, the act of filming and broadcasting Mrs. V’s collapse, did not maximize utility, it follows that there was some other action, Action2, that was open to the camera crew and would have maximized utility. Presumably, however, the camera crew chose A1 because they thought it would maximize utility for them or their employers. Hence, in choosing A1 over A2, the camera crews did not treat Mrs. V’s pains & pleasures as if they were, unit for unit, equal in importance to the pains and pleasures of others. That is, they violated the ‘Each one to count for one, nobody to count for more than one’ rule that is essential to utilitarianism. In so doing, they wronged Mrs. V.

This response does not work, however, because, from the fact that the camera crew wrongly chose A1 over A2, it does not follow that they undervalued Mrs. V’s pains or pleasures in particular. In a case such as this, there are many ways to arrive at the wrong conclusion. (Again, think of the dim-witted student.) In the absence of a specific reason to think that it was Mrs. V’s utility that the camera crew uniquely under-valued, the utilitarian’s point applies equally well to everyone affected by the action. If preferring a lesser aggregate utility to a greater aggregate utility counts as violation, then everyone who is ‘part of’ that aggregate utility, i.e., everyone affected by A1, was wronged the same as Mrs. V.

Of course, the utilitarian can observe (correctly) that some of the people affected by A1 may have been ‘winners’, in that they benefitted by A1 – and it would be odd to think of them as having been wronged by A1.Footnote 8 But even if we focus on the ‘losers’, the people who were caused pain by A1 (or who were worse off under A1 than they would have been under A2), it would still follow that all of these people were wronged in the same sense that Mrs. V allegedly was – which is false.

The utilitarian may reply that some of those others were wronged, too, but insist that Mrs. V was the ‘biggest loser’ in this situation, in that, for her, more than for any other person, A1 added to her pain in a way that A2 would not have, so Mrs. V was wronged in a worse way than other ‘losers’.Footnote 9 This is implausible, however, because of a striking feature of this example: the bereaved mother’s individual utility has already taken such a tremendous hit that it seems silly to suggest that the actions of the camera crew have made it noticeably worse. And yet our judgment that they wronged her persists.Footnote 10

But even if Mrs. V were, in this case, the biggest loser, it would not be an adequate reply, because it still treats the wronging of Mrs. V as a wholly extrinsic feature of A1, when, intuitively, it should be an intrinsic feature of that act (or act-type). In case this is not obvious, consider the following variation: suppose that Mrs. V dies of a heart attack on the spot (because of the shock of hearing the terrible news). Being filmed and broadcast has not caused her any pain up until that point – being distraught, she does not even notice it – and she is not able to suffer any pain after it. But we still want to say that A1 wrongs her, even if ex hypothesi she is not the biggest loser from that action.

Another way of putting the point is this: the only sense that the utilitarian can give to the notion that A1 wrongs or violates Mrs. V involves the combination of two factors: first, that A1 is impermissible (because it fails to maximize utility), and second, that Mrs. V is the biggest loser, given A1. But both of these factors appear to be contingent or extrinsic features of A1. Even if in this possible world A1 fails to maximize utility and Mrs. V is the biggest loser given A1, things could easily have turned out otherwise. But even in relatively similar possible worlds in which A1 does maximize utility or in which A1 maximizes utility but Mrs. V is not the biggest loser, Mrs. V has still been wronged or violated. Indeed, even in worlds in which A1 is in fact permissible, Mrs. V has still been violated – or so I argue.

4 What My Objection Isn’t

To be clear, my point is not the classic ‘laxity’ objection against utilitarianism, that its standards are too lax, that it sometimes permits us to do impermissible things.Footnote 11 I have already granted, in the case of Mrs. V, that the utilitarian also judges the camera crew’s action impermissible. Nor is my point the closely related ‘absolutism’ objection that certain types of action are absolutely wrong and must never be done, but that utilitarianism cannot account this, because it does not rule out any type of action in advance of calculating the effect of particular act tokens on global utility.Footnote 12 This is an important objection to utilitarianism, but it is not my objection here. Partly, this is because, again, I am granting for the sake of argument that (contingently) this particular action does not maximize utility, and therefore, is not permissible according to utilitarianism. Also – and this is a rather different point – it is because a critic who says that Mrs. V was wronged need not hold that such actions are never to be done. Such a critic may hold, for example, a mixed deontological theory of obligation like W.D. Ross’s, according to which the camera crew’s action was prima facie wrong (because it wronged Mrs. V) but that, in those circumstances, the prima facie duty not to harm Mrs. V was outweighed by some other prima facie duty, such as beneficence.Footnote 13 Or they may even hold a kind of ‘negative consequentialism about wronging’ whose goal is to minimize the number of ‘wrongings’ over the long run.Footnote 14 They may allow that Mrs. V was wronged, but insist that, by wronging her, we avoid more wrongings or worse wrongings overall – perhaps because ‘The horrors of terrorism must be graphically depicted if we are going to be aroused sufficiently to combat it, for the sake of global welfare!’).Footnote 15

My point is also not the familiar objection that utilitarianism does not allow for rights. Some philosophers might try to prosecute the Mrs. V case in those terms, and I have no wish to stop them, but that is not my objection here. For one thing, it is not easy to say which of Mrs. V’s rights is relevant. The first candidate that comes to mind, perhaps, is the right to privacy, but it is not clear what that right entails, nor, for reasons already mentioned, that the camera crews infringed it. (The Lockerbie bombing was an international event, the airport was a public place, the camera crews had a right to be there, they did not interfere with Mrs. V’s clothing or person, she did not express any objection to what they were doing, and so on. They simply turned their cameras on, and broadcast what they were seeing.) It would be challenging, I think, to spell out any general right that is plausible, not ad hoc, and applicable to Mrs. V, and that was violated by the actions of the camera crews.Footnote 16

More importantly, even if we think that the camera crews did violate her right to privacy, we may doubt that this accounts for everything we think and feel about this case.Footnote 17 Was violating Mrs. V’s right to privacy the only, or the main, bad thing they did? I want to go further. I claim that Mrs. V herself was violated, and that this is distinct from, and more basic than, the claim that her rights were violated. It is more basic in the sense that the former explains the latter, and not the other way round.Footnote 18 But if that is so, then the wronging objection is more basic than the rights objection.Footnote 19

My point is that utilitarianism cannot make this judgment at all. In the ‘conceptual space’ of utilitarianism, there is no room for it. To put it another way, we may say, using Michael Thompson’s terms, that the camera crews’ wronging of Mrs. V by broadcasting her collapse has an irreducible ‘bipolar’ character, which, he argues, can be captured only in an essentially two-place relational judgment of the form Φ(ξ, ζ).Footnote 20 The judgment is bipolar, because it relates the agent and the victim as the two poles of a morally charged situation: x wronged y by doing A, and in so doing, created the moral analog of an electric current between them, a current that does not necessarily run between x and anyone else. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, is a ‘monadic’ theory; the basic form of its judgments is not ‘x wronged y by doing A’, but ‘x did wrong in doing A’. That is, the agent is related in wrongdoing, not to another person, but to the moral law (or better, ‘unlawfulness’). The utilitarian can pile up as many such monadic moral judgments as he likes, but these will never become a bipolar judgment.

We cannot avoid this problem merely by, e.g., shifting to a more sophisticated version of utilitarianism. Qualitative utilitarianism can, of course, admit of higher and lower pleasures and pains, and assign special significance to the higher ones, available only to creatures with higher faculties. This is beside the point, however, because we are not searching for additional negative consequences of the camera crew’s action, so as to tip the balance against its permissibility. The balance has already been tipped that way. And anyway, since Mrs. V is oblivious to the behavior of the camera crew, their behavior is not adding to her pains, higher or lower, just then, but it is precisely then that she is being wronged.

Likewise, rule utilitarianism can allow for a rule against something it calls ‘violating persons’, as long as that rule is part of the best set of rules, as determined by utilitarian considerations. But from a non-utilitarian perspective, and indeed, from the perspective of many rule utilitarians, this is merely a useful fiction that mimics the judgment but does not actually make it.Footnote 21 I want a theory that actually makes this judgment.

Nor is the problem avoided by invoking ‘person-affecting’ utilitarianism. It is one thing to hold that non-existent persons cannot be wronged (by, say, not being brought into existence); it is another to hold that existent persons can be wronged – and yet another to explain satisfactorily how they can be wronged in terms that are acceptable to individualistic, impersonal, aggregative welfarism.Footnote 22

We may also explain the utilitarian’s inability here in terms of levels of judgments. At a relatively basic level, there are judgments about which actions do or do not maximize utility.Footnote 23 At a higher level, there are judgments about which actions are permissible, impermissible and obligatory. I call this a ‘higher’ level, because, on a utilitarian view, the facts about which actions do or do not maximize utility constitute, or are inferential grounds for, the latter, and not vice versa:

(w) S’s action A1 is wrong

(u) S’s action A1 does not maximize utility

The utilitarian of course has no trouble in moving from the lower level to the higher level; the principle of utility exists precisely to license such a move. If this were the whole of morality, then the utilitarian would have no trouble accounting for it. But as some critics have suggested, there is more to morality than this. Rossians, for example, hold that, between the lower level and the higher level, there is another level, which includes judgments about which actions do or do not violate general principles of prima facie duty:

(w) S’s action A1 is wrong

(p) S’s action A1 violates a prima facie duty of fidelity

(u) S’s action A1 does not maximize utility

Judgments at this intermediate level are not inferable from judgments at the lower level, because the facts about prima facie duty are not constituted by facts about utility. That is, level-p is an irreducible, intermediate level that is not accessible from level-u. Even if the utilitarian aims at level-p judgments, they would inevitably overshoot them, and land on level-w (if anywhere).

I suggest that judgments about wronging, like judgments about prima facie duties, occupy some intermediate level.

(w) S’s action A1 is wrong

(p) S’s action A1 violates a prima facie duty of fidelity

(b) S’s action A1 wrongs T

(u) S’s action A1 does not maximize utility

Perhaps they just are instances or species of normative judgments about prima facie duties, in which case they occupy level-p, but perhaps they are not, in which case they occupy some other intermediate level. In either case, it will again be an irreducible, intermediate level that is not accessible from level-u.

Likewise, judgments about violation, like judgments about prima facie duties, occupy some intermediate level.

(w) S’s action A1 is wrong

(p) S’s action A1 violates a prima facie duty of fidelity

(b) S’s action A1 wrongs T

(v) S’s action A1 violates T

(u) S’s action A1 does not maximize utility

If judgments about violations just are a species of normative judgments about prima facie duties, then they occupy level-p, but perhaps they are not, in which case they occupy some other intermediate level. I am no position to argue for it here, but I find it natural to think of judgments about violation as a sort of intermediate level, thick evaluative judgment.Footnote 24 Again, whatever level they occupy, it will be an irreducible, intermediate level that is not accessible from level-u.

5 Wrong, Wronging and Violation

The utilitarian’s inability to make this judgment may become clearer if we reflect on some of the concepts that have been central to our discussion so far: wrong, wronging and violation. Wrong actions are just that: wrong actions, and as such are offenses against the moral law. (These are in Thompson’s terms monadic, in that a property – wrongness or unlawfulness – is predicated of a subject non-relationally.) But some wrong actions seem also to wrong particular persons, to be offenses especially against them. (They are, in Thompson’s terms, bipolar, in that it is essential to the moral judgments about them that they relate the agent to some particular person in a particular way). Perhaps not every wrong action is an offense against particular persons, but surely some are, in that they specially touch, affect, or are directed at, individual persons.Footnote 25 Lying, stealing, murdering, raping, enslaving, defrauding and insulting, for example, are actions of this sort. To commit such an action is always to wrong someone.

As this list illustrates, there are many kinds of acts that wrong persons, and these may be sub-divided in turn: some ways of wronging a person violate that person, but others ways do not. For example, rape always violates its victim, but fraud does not, even when it seriously and indisputably wrongs them.Footnote 26 What is the difference between wrongs that violate a person and wrongs that do not? It is not easy to say, because, although the idea of ‘violation’ is not new, analytic moral philosophers have only recently started to consider it, and there is no single, authoritative account of it.Footnote 27 Even so, recent work by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Philip Quinn, and especially Robert Adams suggests some promising ways of delineating this idea.

First, and most obviously, according to Adams (1999):

An act that violates a person must attack the person. Its foreseeable effects must be so damaging to the person, or so contrary to her (actual or presumed) will, that fully intending them, in the absence of reason to believe them necessary for the prevention of greater harm to her, would constitute hostility toward the person (Adams 1999: 108, my emphasis).

(This explains why murder is a violation of a person, but tax evasion is not, even where the latter is unjust.)Footnote 28 It is also important to notice that it is a person who is attacked in a violation. Even if we wish to hold that the victim’s rights or the moral law have also been violated, this is derivative or secondary. According to Adams, ‘We speak of “violations” of the moral law, but it cannot be violated in the same sense as a person can. The moral law is not destroyed or damaged, nor is its “self-hood” threatened by immoral actions’ (Adams 1999: 113).

Second, according to Adams (1999: 108), ‘A violation is an act that attacks the person seriously and directly’, typically meaning that it destroys or inflicts long-term damage on them.Footnote 29 (This explains why maiming is a violation, but, a punch on the arm of a healthy adult isn’t, even when the latter is an attack on them.) Adams adds that, ‘Most (but not all) violations of a person will assault her body’ (Adams 1999: 108). (This explains why torture is a violation of a person, but an insulting letter to the editor in a newspaper is not, even when it is scurrilous and hurtful.)

Third, although violations most often target the body, they may also target whatever it is that is constitutive of, or valuable about, persons, including those things that determine the boundaries of the person’s self. Just how broadly are we to conceive of this target? Here, we find some disagreement. Philip Quinn draws the boundaries narrowly, restricting violations to attacks on a person’s body (especially reproductive and other sexual organs), will (as in torture) or rationality (as in brainwashing).Footnote 30 Nicholas Wolterstorff draws the boundaries widely, so as to include all of the above, but also the person’s inner life (their thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, dreams and fantasies), their deepest convictions and their fundamental ways of being invested in or attached to the surrounding world.,Footnote 31 Footnote 32 According to Wolterstorff, this explains, e.g., why laws compelling religious observance, especially alien religious observance, typically constitute a violation of the person compelled, when laws compelling simple payment of taxes typically do not.Footnote 33 Accordingly, Wolterstorff and Quinn disagree over whether a parent’s reading of their teenage child’s personal diary is a violation of the child’s personhood: Wolterstorff thinks it is (or can be), Quinn does not. But even if they disagree on borderline cases such as this, they agree on the paradigm cases, and that these actions directly attack either what is constitutive of human personhood or what is intrinsically valuable about it.

Fourth, true violations of personhood tend to elicit a distinctive moral-psychological reaction: not just disapproval or even outrage, but a ‘metaphysical shudder’ that Adams calls ‘moral horror’: ‘a sense of horror toward certain types of deeds, a feeling that certain things would be horrible to do. Among the kinds of actions that most obviously evoke such a horror are rape, murder, and maiming, torturing, or brainwashing a human being’ (Adams 1999: 104). The presence (or absence) of such feelings does not infallibly indicate whether a violation has occurred, of course, but it is sufficiently reliable, distinctive and strong in certain cases that we regard these cases as paradigms establishing the core of a distinctive moral category.Footnote 34 Moreover, the phenomenology of this horror reinforces our earlier observation that the primary object of violation is a person – the victim – and not, except secondarily, the victim’s rights:

Moral horror is not a consciousness of a command or requirement laid on us by anyone, nor of a rule of any sort, but a feeling about the actions themselves and their consequences. We feel it would be horrible to do certain things even if there were no authoritative rule or social pressure against them…. Our primary feelings about such deeds as murder and torture are not about violation of a rule or requirement, but about what is done to the victims. (Adams 1999: 105)

This fourth point, in turn, may help us to see a fifth: that attacks on the body, will, rationality or inner life of a person can count as violations of that person even when we regard those attacks as morally justified overall. For example: the killing of an enemy combatant or the execution of a justly convicted murderer would still constitute the violation of a human person, even if these were morally permissible on the grounds of, say, standard just war theory or a retributivist account of capital punishment. As Adams, puts it:

‘Even those who believe, as most people do, that there are at least a few circumstances in which it is right to kill another human being are apt to feel a metaphysical shudder, so to speak, at any prospect of doing it, and rightly so. Not only the death is a bad thing, but being an agent of it is morally horrible, even if morally justified or required’ (Adams 1999: 105).Footnote 35

George Orwell (1931) vividly captures a number of these ideas in his famous account of a hanging during his days in the military police in Burma. Orwell recounts how, when a manacled convict was being marched at bayonet point to the gallows, the convict – who was apparently resigned to his fate – nevertheless stepped aside at one point, to avoid a puddle on the path. Orwell notes:

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.Footnote 36 This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less. (Orwell, 1931)Footnote 37

Now, this outline of the concept of ‘violation’ is in danger of digressing and becoming over-long, not least because it is not strictly necessary. It is not necessary, because my claims that the camera crews wronged Mrs. V, and that the utilitarian cannot accommodate this judgment, do not stand or fall with my account of violation. We can still agree that Mrs. V was wronged, even if we do not agree that she was wronged by being violated. Even so, I suggest that something like the accounts by Adams, Wolterstorff, and Quinn are helpful here, because we do feel that the filming and broadcasting of Mrs. V was a violation in their terms. And as such, it is a clear and vivid example of a morally bipolar action: a wronging that is more than just a wrong.

Their account of violation makes sense of, and helps us to articulate, our initially inarticulate reaction to the case of Mrs. V: even when we lack the precise words to express what is wrong with the camera crew’s treatment of her, we may feel a reaction that passes beyond resentment, into something like horror. Their idea of ‘targets’ is useful here, too: the camera crew may not have violated Mrs. V’s will or rationality, but it is not an exaggeration to say that they nevertheless attacked her. They attacked her by targeting her with their cameras when she was in a vulnerable position, with skirt hiked up and her body exposed. Why does this last detail matter? It matters because, according to Adams, destruction and lasting damage to the body are not the only form of violation. Some actions are violations, because they constitute attacks on the self, which, Adams observes,

‘…is partly defined by social structures, and … that certain boundaries between distinct selves are a crucial part of those structures. Prohibitions and permissions about touching and viewing other people’s bodies play an important role in defining such boundaries, and sexual restrictions can contribute to this definition. By the same token, a sexual touching or viewing without full adult consent can rightly be seen as attacking something central to selfhood, and thus as a serious and direct assault on the person… (Adams 1999: 108–9).

Arguably, the camera crews also attacked what Wolterstorff would call Mrs. V’s ‘inner life’, by exposing it to the wider world. It is hard to imagine feelings more strongly expressive of a person’s inner life than a parent’s rage and grief for a dead child. Equally, it is hard to imagine a clearer example of ‘turning the inner into the outer’, than to broadcast this rage and grief on international television.

Finally, the account even sheds light on how we could make these judgments and have these reactions, even when we were not sure that Mrs. V’s rights were violated, or even if we thought that the camera crew’s action was, on balance, morally justified.

6 Conclusion

In broadcasting Mrs. V’s collapse, the camera crew violated Mrs. V, and in doing so, they wronged her. This is what many of us want to say, but it is what the utilitarian cannot say. Some utilitarians will insist that they can say these things, but I have argued that they are wrong. Other utilitarians will agree that they cannot say these things, but shrug it off, saying ‘Who cares about such pre-theoretical moral judgments?’ I have nothing to say to them, except that that response, like the inability to make the judgment itself, is an example of what Bernard Williams (1963) describes as utilitarianism’s ‘simple-mindedness’, which, he says, ‘… consists in having too few thoughts and feelings to match the world as it really is.’ (Williams 1963: 149)

I believe that Williams is right. Indeed, my whole argument may be seen as another illustration of the idea that the utilitarian has too few thoughts. If I am right, one of the utilitarian’s missing thoughts is that some actions wrong some people; another is that some actions violate some people; still another is that some actions wrong some people by violating them.