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.

    • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
      12·
      3 months ago

      I don’t think any theoretical model is gonna be able to perfectly describe the complexities of human ethics, let alone prescribe “good” actions in broad strokes. But any of them might be useful lenses to judge a situation by.

      Maybe this is just the lingering influence of my days when I was a fan of Max Stirner, but both of those tasks seem to be kind of pointless and impossible.

      Right away, by making moral theories into lenses, or tools to be picked and chosen, you have undermined their imperative power.

      Essentially, you have just kicked the can down the road, because we now need a meta moral theory to determine which moral theory produces the best outcome for which situation.

      Really, hume’s guillotine (one cannot derive an ought statement from an is statement) kills any rational or empirical approach to morality dead in its tracks.