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.
I’ll spare a longer post, but it’s all analytical and under determined, and any criticism of a leftist project can and is attacked under other various ethical theories as well (what’shisname’s (good faith) post questioned if it was morally defensible to off the Romanov kids; he didn’t do this from a utilitarian perspective).
A more common experience imo is running into accusations that leftist policies fail because they wrongly let the ends justify the means, not that they are too unconcerned w aggregate happiness (see aforementioned post/argument (from a_blanqui_slate?)). This is because leftist policies are seen as departing from a baseline of the distributive status quo, such that these departures, because they are almost necessarily not-pareto superior (ie, require a redistribution where someone must be made worse off), can always be argued to infringe on some ex ante Right, and are thus unacceptable on some deontological theory; of course, one could rhetorically change the analytic baseline, and argue that the status quo of distribution already departs and infringes on a prior Right, and argue for amelioration from a Rights based perspective; and which is again to say, it’s all analytical and immaterial.