During the last financial crisis, we had a choice between two unsavory alternatives. We could either let some large corporations go bankrupt, or bail them out, ultimately, with the taxpayer’s money. We decided to bail them out, based on the claim that “allowing them to go under would generate thousands of unemployed workers”, and that this would cause overwhelming unhappiness in our society.
But these calculations left out one important factor: the bailing out option also meant that we would be paying millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to the stockholders of these corporations! So millions of taxpayers had to accept years of diminished income to save thousands of workers plus millions of affluent stockholders. I submit that the morally correct choice changes if this factor is not ignored, and hence I would not have bailed out these corporations.
Group of answer choices
Consequentialism
Duty Theory
Virtue Theory
None of the above