The leader of a militia that has spent twenty years losing finally has something: a child who is immune, a surgeon who believes he can derive a vaccine from her, and an operating theatre. The procedure will kill the child. Nobody asks her. The leader knows the girl, promised her mother she would look after her, and orders the operation anyway, and when she is challenged she does not reach for euphemism or for necessity. She states the calculation: one life against everyone. That is not a monstrous position. It is the position that underpins most of the criminal law in the world, and its problem is not that it is obviously wrong.
// The theoryThe calculation that built modern punishment
Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) proposed that morality and legislation alike should be settled by one measure: the tendency of an action to augment or diminish the happiness of the parties affected. He even specified the dimensions of the felicific calculus — intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent — and applied it directly to punishment with a conclusion that was radical in its time and is now orthodoxy. Since punishment is itself an infliction of suffering, it is prima facie an evil, and it can only be justified by the greater suffering it prevents. From that single premise Bentham derived the principles that still structure sentencing: penalties should be no greater than necessary, they should be proportionate so that offenders have a reason to choose the lesser offense, and any punishment that is groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable or needless ought not to be imposed. Nineteenth-century penal reform, the retreat of capital punishment and the entire modern language of cost-effectiveness in criminal justice descend from this.
The objection is not squeamishness. It is the separateness of persons
The standard criticism of utilitarianism is not that the sums are unpleasant but that the method has no place to record something it needs to record. Because it aggregates welfare across people, it treats the boundary between one person and another as morally unimportant — and that is what allows a large enough benefit to anyone to license any cost to someone. Rawls named the flaw precisely: utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons, extending to society a principle of rational choice that only makes sense within a single life, where a person may legitimately accept a present cost for a future gain of their own. Kant's formulation supplies the other half: treat humanity always as an end and never merely as a means. And the specific device that captures what Marlene is doing has a name in bioethics — informed consent. The objection to the surgery is not the arithmetic; it is that the person whose life is being spent was not asked. Everything in the modern research-ethics apparatus, from Nuremberg to Helsinki to institutional review boards, exists because the aggregate case for an experiment has been made repeatedly and persuasively by people who were not going to be the subject of it.
// The subjectThe one variable she leaves out of her own equation
What makes Marlene a case rather than a strawman is that she is competent at the calculation and honest about it. She is not enjoying this, not seeking power, and not lying to herself; she has held the position for twenty years, has lost nearly everyone, and is the only person in the story with a plausible claim to be acting for the species. The series also supplies the failure of her reasoning without editorialising, and it is a failure internal to the method. Her expected-value computation multiplies an enormous benefit by a probability she never examines — the vaccine is a hypothesis held by one surgeon in a collapsed world, with no trial, no second opinion and no capacity to manufacture or distribute anything even if it worked. Utilitarian reasoning is only as good as its probability estimates, and the strongest practical criticism of the framework is that catastrophic or utopian stakes reliably corrupt them: when the payoff is “everyone”, almost any probability survives multiplication, which is the structure of every atrocity ever justified by a future.
That is what places her exactly opposite Joel in this hub. He acts on an attachment he never articulates and cannot justify; she acts on a justification she articulates perfectly and cannot feel. The series refuses to resolve it, and the refusal is the reason both files exist.
Marlene
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// The crackTwo centuries of unresolved argument, and a live one
Utilitarianism's problems are old, well mapped and genuinely unresolved. The measurement problem: Bentham's calculus assumes interpersonal comparison of welfare, and there is no agreed method for doing it — modern cost-benefit analysis in criminal justice proceeds by monetising harms, which works passably for property and very badly for everything else. The rights problem: as stated, act-utilitarianism permits punishing an innocent person where the deterrent gain exceeds the cost, and the standard escape — rule-utilitarianism, which evaluates practices rather than acts and rules that a policy of framing the innocent has terrible consequences overall — is either a genuine repair or a collapse into rule-worship, depending on whom you ask. The prediction problem is the one that bites hardest in criminal justice: consequences must be forecast, forecasts about deterrence have been wrong for decades in a consistent direction, and a framework that licenses severity on the basis of predicted prevention has underwritten a great deal of policy that did not prevent anything. And the demandingness problem cuts the other way: taken seriously, the framework requires far more of people than anyone does. What survives is substantial and should not be lost in the objections. The insistence that punishment must justify itself by its effects, rather than by desert or tradition, is the single most useful idea criminal policy has, and it is the reason we can ask of any sanction whether it works — a question that retributivism, on its own terms, does not have to answer.
Someone else pays the cost
Marlene intends to kill a fourteen-year-old who was not consulted, and the fact that her reasoning is coherent is what makes the file worth writing rather than what excuses her. The archive contains the same structure several times over — Kanou with a research question, Wendy with an escalation, Kathleen with a just grievance — and the common feature is never malice. It is a calculation that came out in favor, performed by someone who was not going to be the cost. The practical residue of two hundred years of this argument is a single procedural rule, and it is the one Marlene breaks: when the sum requires spending a person, that person is the one who has to agree.
Three key ideas
- Bentham (1789) made the greatest happiness the measure of both morality and legislation, and derived the principles that still structure sentencing: punishment is itself an evil, must be no greater than necessary, proportionate, and never groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable or needless.
- The standard objection is not squeamishness: aggregating welfare across people ignores what Rawls called the separateness of persons, which is what lets a large enough benefit license any cost. The device that captures it is informed consent, and the research-ethics apparatus exists because the aggregate case has been made persuasively before.
- Her failure is internal to the method: an enormous payoff multiplied by an unexamined probability. Utopian stakes reliably corrupt the estimates, which is the structure of every atrocity justified by a future. What survives is the demand that punishment justify itself by its effects.
Sources · to keep reading
- Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
- Mill, J. S. (1863). Utilitarianism.
- Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.
- Williams, B. y Smart, J. J. C. (1973). Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press.
- Beauchamp, T. L. y Childress, J. F. (1979). Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Oxford University Press.
- Hart, H. L. A. (1968). Punishment and Responsibility. Oxford University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Marlene?
Marlene is a villain from The Last of Us, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. She does not deceive herself for a second.
Why does Marlene become a villain?
Marlene and utilitarianism: the leader who weighs one death against a cure and says so out loud. The file on the calculation that founded modern criminal law, and on what that calculation cannot count.
Which criminological theory explains Marlene?
Marlene's case is analysed through Utilitarianism. Bentham's utilitarianism is the philosophical basis of modern criminal law: the right action is the one producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and punishment — itself an evil — is justified only if it prevents a greater one. Good things came out of it: proportionality, the abolition of penalties that served no purpose, the idea that a sanction must account for its usefulness. And out of it also comes the problem moral philosophy has failed to settle for two centuries, which Marlene places in an operating theatre: if the sum works out, may a person be used as a means? She says yes, she says it without rhetoric, and the rest of the series is the answer.
