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’m mostly ambivalent to it, but I remember in a political philosophy class I took back in college, we went over what utilitarians said about US democracy, and it was funny as fuck to see all these jackasses shift from “yes, consequentialism is where it’s at, the outcome determines the moral worth of an action!” to “… uh, actually it’s the process that really makes a government democratic…”