If it were known to be true, as a question of fact, that measures which caused misery and death to tens of millions today would result in saving from greater misery and from death hundreds of millions in the future, and if this were the only way in which it could be done, then it would be right to cause these necessary atrocities. The case is surely no different in principle from that of the battalion commander who sacrifices a patrol to save a company. Where the tyrants who cause atrocities for the sake of Utopia are wrong is, surely, on the plain question of fact, and on confusing probabilities with certainties. After all, one would have to be very sure that future generations would be saved still greater misery before one embarked on a programme of liquidation of peasants, or whatever else we thought would help to bring about Utopia. And one thing we should now know about the future is that large-scale predictions are impossible. Could Jeremy Bentham or Karl Marx (to take two very different political theorists) have foreseen the atom bomb? Could they have foreseen automation? Can we foresee the technology of the next century? Where the future is so dim a man must be mad who would sacrifice the present in a big way for the sake of it. Moreover even if the future were clear to us, it is very improbable that large scale atrocities could be beneficial. We must not forget the immense side effects: the brutalization of the people who ordered the atrocities and carried them out. We can, in fact, agree with the most violent denouncer of atrocities carried out in the name of Utopia without sacrificing our act utilitarian principles. Indeed there are the best of act utilitarian reasons for denouncing them. But it is empirical facts, and empirical facts only, which lead me to say this.
(J. J. C. Smart, An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics [Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1961], 46 [italics in original])
Note from KBJ: Smart is an act utilitarian, and therefore a consequentialist (as opposed to a deontologist). Not only does he not think it absolutely wrong to kill innocent people; he doesn't think it's intrinsically wrong. In his view, the only reason not to kill tens of millions of innocent people in order to save hundreds of millions of innocent people is that we can't be sure it will have that effect! If we were sure that it would have that effect, then it would be wrong not to do it.
Note 2 from KBJ: Smart says that the case is "no different in principle from that of the battalion commander who sacrifices a patrol to save a company." Really? Don't soldiers consent to being used as mere means to larger military ends? Did you consent to being used as a mere means to some larger social end? I know I didn't. Does Smart think of society as a military operation, in which each of us has a distinct role to play? Are we all working toward some single articulated goal? John Rawls was right: "Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons" (A Theory of Justice [1971], 27). You see that very clearly in Smart's remark.
