The Impossibility of Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the ideology of two tribes: a vast majority of academic economists, and a notable fraction of English-speaking philosophers. It enjoins one to maximize the sum of individuals’ “pleasures less pains”, or “utilitiesor “felicities”. Now, we will make clear that there is no entity, attached to individuals, that can meaningfully both (1) be subjected to an operation of addition, and (2) sufficiently “measure” individual happiness, pleasure, etc. Hence, utilitarianism strictly understood is simply meaningless. The various attempts one can imagine for making sense of it indeed turn out to fail when closely scrutinized. These attempts include casual empirical interindividual comparisons of “happiness” or “pleasure”, mathematically “separable” “social welfare functions”, and the justifications using uncertainty. Among the latter, the “Original Position” theory indeed delivers utilitarianism, but it is not a social ethical theory.