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 think utilitarianism is more good than bad. It’s one of the major ethical systems, and is often more satisfying than deontological systems or universalizing systems. I’ve seen Kantians get wrapped up in silly beliefs due to their categorical imperatives at least as much as utilitarian/consequentialist ethical floundering. The only meaningful alternative is virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the ethical agent, but that raises its own questions of how to ground the virtues in a generalizable way. I’m very interested in the attempts to revive virtue ethics.
Among the utilitarians are debates of what to min-max. For example, do we maximize pleasure and become hedonists? Do we minimize suffering like a Buddhist might? I think it’s an interesting question, defining the “utile” in our actions.
As a Buddhist, I’m drawn to negative utilitarianism or ‘suffering-focused ethics’. It gets memed on to a ridiculous degree though by people saying shit like “if you want to eliminate suffering, shouldn’t you just kill everyone so they can’t suffer anymore?”
and it makes the whole field of philosophy look like redditors.
Utilitarianism and deontology are dead ends and offers nothing that virtue ethics doesn’t offer as well. Utilitarianism and deontology might be what’s debated in academia, but most people irl still practice a form of virtue ethics. WWJD is something that many people sincerely ask themselves, but far more common is making moral decisions based on past decisions made by people they trust or admire. It’s often a parental or authority figure, and in this day and age, decisions made by celebrities are factored in as well. They seek counsel from people they trust and admire. When a friend asks you about a difficult choice they have to make that also has a moral dimension, they essentially see you as a trusted and level-headed person whose personal moral qualities (ie virtue) are sufficiently cultivated enough that your advice can be followed. Contrary to what utilitarians and deontologists say, normal people aren’t vibing their way through difficult moral decisions but relying on a form of virtue ethics.