I think that in any type of satisficing condequentialism, people should be expected to use willpower to do the things they are required to do anyway, as part of Hare's two-level utilitarianism. People are expected to overcome their urge to murder people in their day-to-day life. Not murdering is, in the words of Chris Rock, stuff "you're supposed to do."
The willpower that "willpower satisficing" is talking about is whatever willpower you have left over after doing the "stuff you're supposed to do" in order to meet the basic moral obligations of Harean two-level utilitarianism. It's true that people are psychologically diverse, so it takes some people more willpower to meet those obligations than others. But I don't think basic Harean stuff should "count" towards the amount of willpower you have to "spend" before an action becomes "permissable."
Under this model, it is not permissable to shoot Bob because otherwise you would have to use willpower to overcome your urge to kill him, because overcoming your urge to kill is something "you're supposed to do." This does create the seemingly odd conclusion that the permissiability of shooting Bob depends on the motive for doing so. It might be permissable in Richard's "child simulacrum" situation, or in a situation where the path to Bob is significantly less perilous than the path to the sandbag. That is because overcoming the urge to murder is something you are "supposed to do," whereas overcoming the urge to protect your child and overcoming the urge to protect yourself from injury is not. That might sound strange, but it's no stranger than any of the other quasi-deontological rules that two-level utilitarianism recommends we follow.
I should also mention that treating willpower as a single fixed pool we draw on for all actions is probably an oversimplification. It is an accurate enough model for most situations, but it's probably not the whole story, and that may explain some of our inconsistent intuitions about these edge cases. For instance, it may be that there are multiple "pools" of willpower in the mind, and that actions that two-level utilitarianism would consider "obligatory" draw from a different pool than ones that it considers "superogatory."
It's important in this case that (i) saving the five at all is supererogatory (due to the general difficulty of pursuing either means to doing so), and (ii) it would be permissible to kill Bob to save the five if there was no other means to doing so.
But yeah, in practice it's surely worth incorporating further procedural (or "two-level") barriers to killing, which also puts pressure on stipulation (ii) above. To identify a sense in which consequentialism "recommends" killing, one has to be talking more about the fundamental *criterion* of rightness (as philosophers tend to focus on) rather than the practically-recommended decision procedure (which is more likely to be of interest to people in general).
If you use a plural pronoun when referring to an individual of unknown sex you've lost me. The longstanding convention of using masculine singular pronouns for the same purpose was fine and dandy, IMO, but if feminist blowback has put that beyond the pale "he/she" is a better recourse than "they," fer cryssakes!
I think that in any type of satisficing condequentialism, people should be expected to use willpower to do the things they are required to do anyway, as part of Hare's two-level utilitarianism. People are expected to overcome their urge to murder people in their day-to-day life. Not murdering is, in the words of Chris Rock, stuff "you're supposed to do."
The willpower that "willpower satisficing" is talking about is whatever willpower you have left over after doing the "stuff you're supposed to do" in order to meet the basic moral obligations of Harean two-level utilitarianism. It's true that people are psychologically diverse, so it takes some people more willpower to meet those obligations than others. But I don't think basic Harean stuff should "count" towards the amount of willpower you have to "spend" before an action becomes "permissable."
Under this model, it is not permissable to shoot Bob because otherwise you would have to use willpower to overcome your urge to kill him, because overcoming your urge to kill is something "you're supposed to do." This does create the seemingly odd conclusion that the permissiability of shooting Bob depends on the motive for doing so. It might be permissable in Richard's "child simulacrum" situation, or in a situation where the path to Bob is significantly less perilous than the path to the sandbag. That is because overcoming the urge to murder is something you are "supposed to do," whereas overcoming the urge to protect your child and overcoming the urge to protect yourself from injury is not. That might sound strange, but it's no stranger than any of the other quasi-deontological rules that two-level utilitarianism recommends we follow.
I should also mention that treating willpower as a single fixed pool we draw on for all actions is probably an oversimplification. It is an accurate enough model for most situations, but it's probably not the whole story, and that may explain some of our inconsistent intuitions about these edge cases. For instance, it may be that there are multiple "pools" of willpower in the mind, and that actions that two-level utilitarianism would consider "obligatory" draw from a different pool than ones that it considers "superogatory."
It's important in this case that (i) saving the five at all is supererogatory (due to the general difficulty of pursuing either means to doing so), and (ii) it would be permissible to kill Bob to save the five if there was no other means to doing so.
But yeah, in practice it's surely worth incorporating further procedural (or "two-level") barriers to killing, which also puts pressure on stipulation (ii) above. To identify a sense in which consequentialism "recommends" killing, one has to be talking more about the fundamental *criterion* of rightness (as philosophers tend to focus on) rather than the practically-recommended decision procedure (which is more likely to be of interest to people in general).
If you use a plural pronoun when referring to an individual of unknown sex you've lost me. The longstanding convention of using masculine singular pronouns for the same purpose was fine and dandy, IMO, but if feminist blowback has put that beyond the pale "he/she" is a better recourse than "they," fer cryssakes!