&gt;  the government could switch to a &quot;utilitarian&quot; point of view - minimize the number of lost lives<p>There&#x27;s nothing &quot;utilitarian&quot; about this, unless you assume that:<p>(a) All people value their own lives equally<p>(b) Nobody places <i>any</i> value on anyone&#x27;s life but their own.<p>(Side note: we know that both of those don&#x27;t even come close to being true.)<p>Without those assumptions, a utilitarian point of view will show some pretty obvious biases against just killing the fewest people -- among other things, it will try to kill older people rather than younger people, and to kill people with the smallest number of relatives (who would be sad about a death in their family).