Two ideas that do not always travel together: impartial concern for everyone's good, and a willingness to harm one person if the numbers come out ahead.
About this test
The Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (Kahane, Everett, and colleagues) split utilitarian judgment into impartial beneficence and instrumental harm. Classic utilitarianism, from Bentham and Mill through Singer, needs both: each person's good counts, and the right act produces the best total, even if the means are ugly. Many people endorse one half and reject the other. These items are original. The headline percent averages the two clusters. Read them separately before you decide what the average means. A high score is not 'more moral.'
Question 1 of 11
What this test asks
If harming one person would clearly prevent much worse harm to many, that harm can be the right act.
Some harms are forbidden even when they would improve the total outcome.
I would divert a threat from five people onto one person if those were the only options.
It can be right to break a serious rule when the numbers are large enough.
I judge an act by the suffering and flourishing it produces, not by the type of act it is.
A stranger far away counts, morally, about as much as a neighbor, if the needs are equal.
I owe much more to people near me. Distant strangers are a charity, not a duty of the same kind.
I should give up a comfort if that money or time would help others substantially more.
If I can save five strangers or one friend and not both, the five have the stronger moral claim.
Partiality to my family is a moral reason, not a bias I am required to overcome.
From a moral point of view, my own projects do not automatically outrank other people's urgent needs.
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