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.
Utilitarianism is just “the ends justifies the means” laundered through 19th century English hippies.
Laundered? I thought utilitarians were pretty open about being concequentialists. When I was a utilitarian, I thought this was just obvious.
‘The ends justify the means’ is actually a(n undeservedly-maligned) good take. The ends are a primary thing that determines what means are appropriate, and I’m not sure how anybody can argue against this.
Utilitarianism is just garbage that is no more insightful than vibes-based examination of actions.
This is exactly how I feel, and is only a problem to liberals (I mean philosophical liberals) who don’t understand that certain ends can only be reached by certain means, and conversely certain means can never reach certain ends.
They live in a reality where “authoritarian” measures like a one-party state are just the personal preference of dictatorial leaders who are misguided or evil and who could have just chosen to be “good” instead, rather than those measures being the only way to survive the imperial onslaught.