Don’t know if I am preaching to the choir, but with how much libs try to use the trolley problem to support their favorite war criminal, it got me thinking just how cringe utilitarianism is.
Whatever utilitarianism may be in theory, in practice, it just trains people to think like bureaucrats who belive themselves to be impartial observers of society (not true), holding power over the lives of others for the sake of the common good. It’s imo a perfect distillation of bourgeois ideology into a theory of ethics. It’s a theory of ethics from the pov of a statesman or a capitalist. Only those groups of people have the power and information necessary to actually act in a meaningfully utilitarian manner.
It’s also note worthy just how prone to creating false dichotomies and ignoring historical context utilitarians are. Although this might just be the result of the trolley problem being so popular.
The problem with that stupid trolley problem meme is not that it implies utilitarianism, but that it’s myopic question-begging that very precisely controls what is and isn’t considered “relevant” information. Also it just plain lies even within that narrow scope about who is on the chopping block in a blue regime.
Love how the moral culpability is on the lever-puller and not the party who actually tied the people up in the tracks in the first place.