I don’t think utilitarianism is a useful tool for analyzing structural problems. Which is what I was trying to condense into a funny quip. If you look at Peter Singer, the most prominent modern day utilitarian, you still see that he has terrible takes on pretty much anything geopolitical and isn’t an anti-capitalist. I actually don’t have a problem with consequentialism generally, but the materialist analysis is just more effective. I have limited philosophical knowledge so I probably can’t answer your actual question.
Utilitarianism isn’t an analytical framework, it’s just a common sense framing of the objective of normative ethics. Do what results in the best world. I think Che would agree with Singer’s main points, and if Singer had a correct understanding of reality, he’d advocate everyone be like Che.
The objective of most ethics isn’t to “do what results in the best world”. What makes up a “best world” is already complicated enough by itself to have generated entirely different schools of thought. And whether that’s a worthwhile goal is just as complex
The refutation of utilitarianism is that happiness cannot be measured. Neither can the value of a human life.
The entirety of “utilitarianism” as it is currently practiced relies on the idea that you can, and, because of the lack of concrete numbers for these things, you can literally argue for anything you want with it.
For instance, someone could say that working one hour as a landlord is more painful than working for ten hours as a tenant, because the landlord is less used to working, so landlord work hour = -20 happiness units and prole work hour = -3 happiness units, and then go on to conclude that a worker working for 5 hours is justifiable if it prevents a landlord from working for 1 hour. The problem with this is that everything I just said was entirely made up (and the premise is blatantly false), and the units themselves are never defined, not even in actual examples from self-described utilitarians, fundamentally meaning that this nonsense, outright reactionary take I just used as an example of the flaw of mathematical utilitarian thinking, is exactly as valid as every other equation anyone has done to calculate utilitarianism. The entire concept of calculating happiness is vague nonsense and can only make sense in our commodified world where we’ve reduced everything down to a value.
Utilitarianism sort of works as a general principle, but even then, none of this is getting in to the numerous different kinds of utilitarianism that also argue for entirety different actions at different times, and even entirely different premises
Ok so first of all whatever landlords do isn’t “work”. But apart from that, the distribution of labour in a planned economy is still very much a concrete problem that has to be solved mathematically. In socialism, people will still need to work X hours a year, even if X is now determined by their mental or physical aptitude, the difficulty of the labour performed, the progress of technology, or external conditions; and this X has to be determined in the central planning agency in a calculation that cannot be circumvented by moral philosophy. I’m not saying we can do the same sort of computation for the minimum possible amount of “bad” in the world, morally speaking, but to quantify labour is possible and indeed necessary in order for scientific socialism to be realised.
Ok but I still struggle to see what would be the refutation of utilitarianism in the context of a socialist society. Surely deontology can’t be it
I don’t think utilitarianism is a useful tool for analyzing structural problems. Which is what I was trying to condense into a funny quip. If you look at Peter Singer, the most prominent modern day utilitarian, you still see that he has terrible takes on pretty much anything geopolitical and isn’t an anti-capitalist. I actually don’t have a problem with consequentialism generally, but the materialist analysis is just more effective. I have limited philosophical knowledge so I probably can’t answer your actual question.
Utilitarianism isn’t an analytical framework, it’s just a common sense framing of the objective of normative ethics. Do what results in the best world. I think Che would agree with Singer’s main points, and if Singer had a correct understanding of reality, he’d advocate everyone be like Che.
The objective of most ethics isn’t to “do what results in the best world”. What makes up a “best world” is already complicated enough by itself to have generated entirely different schools of thought. And whether that’s a worthwhile goal is just as complex
The refutation of utilitarianism is that happiness cannot be measured. Neither can the value of a human life.
The entirety of “utilitarianism” as it is currently practiced relies on the idea that you can, and, because of the lack of concrete numbers for these things, you can literally argue for anything you want with it.
For instance, someone could say that working one hour as a landlord is more painful than working for ten hours as a tenant, because the landlord is less used to working, so landlord work hour = -20 happiness units and prole work hour = -3 happiness units, and then go on to conclude that a worker working for 5 hours is justifiable if it prevents a landlord from working for 1 hour. The problem with this is that everything I just said was entirely made up (and the premise is blatantly false), and the units themselves are never defined, not even in actual examples from self-described utilitarians, fundamentally meaning that this nonsense, outright reactionary take I just used as an example of the flaw of mathematical utilitarian thinking, is exactly as valid as every other equation anyone has done to calculate utilitarianism. The entire concept of calculating happiness is vague nonsense and can only make sense in our commodified world where we’ve reduced everything down to a value.
Utilitarianism sort of works as a general principle, but even then, none of this is getting in to the numerous different kinds of utilitarianism that also argue for entirety different actions at different times, and even entirely different premises
Ok so first of all whatever landlords do isn’t “work”. But apart from that, the distribution of labour in a planned economy is still very much a concrete problem that has to be solved mathematically. In socialism, people will still need to work X hours a year, even if X is now determined by their mental or physical aptitude, the difficulty of the labour performed, the progress of technology, or external conditions; and this X has to be determined in the central planning agency in a calculation that cannot be circumvented by moral philosophy. I’m not saying we can do the same sort of computation for the minimum possible amount of “bad” in the world, morally speaking, but to quantify labour is possible and indeed necessary in order for scientific socialism to be realised.
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