Groucho Marxism

In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions to maximize happiness and well-being, or ‘utility’, for the affected individuals. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which posits that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. The idea that we should aim to maximize utility seems perfectly sensible at first, but dig a little deeper and problems soon begin to emerge. The first problem we encounter is that of quantifying utility. It just isn’t possible to do this in any non-arbitrary way. All we can really do in practice is say that one individual is happier or more well-off than another individual. This demonstrates that happiness and well-being are relative rather than absolute concepts.

Even if we could meaningfully quantify utility, it would be impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because the consequences of actions our are inherently unknowable. Then there is the problem of how to aggregate the utility of different individuals. The obvious solution to add together the utility of different individuals (assuming we could quantify them in the first place) leads to paradoxes such as the so-called ‘repugnant conclusion’, whereby an immense population with lives that are only barely worth living is deemed superior to a smaller population enjoying a life of great fulfilment. Other measures of aggregate utility, such as taking the average utility, avoid the repugnant conclusion but create other paradoxes.

Another problem with utilitarianism, and with consequentialism more generally, is that judging actions based on consequences means the actions of an individual can end up being judged more or less harshly based on factors that are completely outside of an individual’s control. I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where our actions have resulted in consequences which could have been have been a lot worse had outside factors not gone our way, or conversely, could have been a lot better if outside factors had not gone against us. Yet another problem concerns justice. It’s not hard to think of situations where an obvious miscarriage of justice would result in greater overall ‘utility’ – for example, framing an innocent person for a murder in order to provide some closure to the murder victim’s family.

So we can see that there are many problems with utilitarianism. This wouldn’t matter it utilitarianism was a fringe view, but the whole of neoclassical economics, by far the most dominant paradigm in the academic economics world, is based on the idea of that individuals act so as to maximize their ‘utility’. A neoclassical economist might argue that the point of economics is to describe what people do rather than to describe what they should do, so the philosophical objections to utilitarianism outlined above are irrelevant. The problem with this argument is that these are not just philosophical objections; they are objections based on how individuals act in practice. The idea, for example, that people work out all the possible consequences of their actions before taking them is obviously nonsense.

This isn’t just an academic argument though: utilitarianism is an idea that has impacts in the real world. Perhaps the most egregious example of the mess this idea can get you into is the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, the American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in 2023. In 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion. Bankman-Fried was vilified in the media, but he was a committed utilitarian who probably thought what he was doing was right. Prior to his arrest and conviction, Bankman-Fried publicly stated he supported the ‘effective altruism’ movement, the philosophical and social movement that advocates calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest overall good.

What are the alternatives to utilitarianism and consequentialism? Perhaps the most well-established alternative is known as deontology, according to which the moral rightness of actions is based on a set of norms or principles. Immanuel Kant is one of the most well-known deontologists. The foundation of Kant’s ethics is the so-called categorical imperative. Kant gave four separate formulations of his categorical imperative, of which the best known is probably the first: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Although Kant usually gets the credit for this, this idea actually goes back many centuries, and is often referred to as the ‘golden rule.’ This seems to me a pretty solid basis on which to base a normative ethical theory.