Category: ethics
Type: thought experiment
Associated thinker(s): Bernard Williams (author of “A Critique of Utilitarianism”); J. J. C. Smart (co-author of the volume)
Original publication or approximate period: Smart and Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973), Williams’s part
Difficulty: Intermediate
Themes: integrity, consequentialism, responsibility
Related experiments: Trolley Problem; Transplant Problem; Utility Monster
Jim, a traveller, arrives in a small town where an army captain is about to execute twenty captives chosen at random as a warning. The captain offers a choice: if Jim personally shoots one captive, the other nineteen will be released; if Jim refuses, all twenty will be killed. Williams says that Jim’s own attempt to overpower the captain and soldiers would fail. For this retelling, assume the captain honors the offer and no third party can intervene; the latter is an added constraint, not stated explicitly by Williams.
A direct utilitarian reckoning says Jim should shoot under those conditions: one death is better than twenty. Williams argues that this answer is too quick.
Do a person’s deepest commitments and sense of integrity count for something in deciding what to do, or must they be weighed like any other preference in an impartial calculation?
The case targets a feature of act utilitarianism: it can treat an agent’s action as one causal route among others toward the best overall outcome. Williams objects that this can fail to respect the fact that actions are done by people whose projects and commitments help make them who they are. He also argues that the demand to maximize can alienate people from their own moral lives.
The case separates two questions: what outcome is best, and what an agent may be required to do in order to bring it about.
Williams says utilitarianism recommends shooting under the case’s stated conditions, but he does not present Jim’s choice as a simple example in which the theory gives the wrong answer. Interpretations of the integrity objection differ. Some direct act-utilitarian approaches focus on the outcome calculation; indirect or agent-relative consequentialist theories may respond differently, and other theories add constraints or prerogatives. These are examples of possible approaches, not an exhaustive taxonomy or a settled consensus.
The argument is not that integrity always overrides saving lives, and Williams does not claim that Jim is certainly wrong to shoot. The point concerns what kind of reasoning the theory permits Jim to treat as relevant. The case is not an empirical claim about how any real person would behave.
Williams pairs Jim with a second case about a chemist who has qualms about work on weapons. Altering who the captives are, how certain the offer is, or whether Jim has promised something changes the structure of the case; these are teaching prompts, not descriptions of the original text.
The complete 1973 volume PDF was accessed and parsed; its title, copyright, and contents pages and the relevant Williams passages on Jim and integrity were read. Relevant passages in the SEP entries and two peer-reviewed analyses were also read. Williams’s text locates the original case in a South American town and identifies the captives using a term omitted here. This retelling removes those specific place and identity labels but retains a generic small-town execution setting. The captain’s reliability and the absence of third-party intervention are additional assumptions in this version. Williams’s argument and its later interpretations remain disputed; no consensus or human expert review is claimed.
Research check: 2026-11-01. Claim-level evidence, access limits, and unresolved issues are recorded in the source-review ledger.