Kill one innocent man to save nineteen — utilitarianism says just do the math

In Bernard Williams's 'Jim and the Indians' case, a captor offers Jim a deal: shoot one bound man himself, or watch all twenty die. Utilitarianism calls the answer obvious — shoot the one. Williams argued that obviousness is the problem: it treats 'I decided this' and 'I merely let it happen' as interchangeable, asking Jim to sacrifice his own integrity to someone else's arithmetic.

— Bernard Williams (with J. J. C. Smart), Utilitarianism: For and Against — "A Critique of Utilitarianism," Cambridge University Press, 1973
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