Utilitarianism in action

I got in trouble over at EOTAW for bringing up Mary Jo Kopechne in response to Ted Kennedy's (unfortunate, premature) death. Apparently it was gauche to interrupt the canonization of Teddy as the Greatest American Senator Ever.

No one, however, quite came out and said, "what's one dead chick versus the good that Kennedy later accomplished?"

Joyce Carol Oates has now filled that indecency gap:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

What, indeed?