Suppose you are a member of the waitstaff at a restaurant and unknown to you the chef wants to kill a frequent customer. The chef puts a little bit of arsenic in the customer's food every time they order and over time the chef knows that the poison will slowly accumulate and kill the customer. Suppose you are serving the customer's last meal--after one last bite of the arsenic-tainted food the customer will go home and die. And this is in fact what happened.
- According to act utilitarianism, is your act of serving the customer's last meal morally good, morally bad, or morally neutral (neither good nor bad)?
- Why would the utilitarian characterize your action in this way, in particular, do most utilitarians take the actual results of an act over its expected results in calculating if an act is good or bad?
- Under act utilitarianism should you be held morally responsible for your action? In detail, why or why not?