Dictatorship of the Utilitariat

Utilitarianism — or anything that involves ‘maximising the greater good’ — is nonsense.

There is no correct way to measure harm. There is no scale for comparing one person's happiness with another's. Any claim made by a utilitarian is merely their subjective assessment of reality, based on their priors — priors which, where the stakes are highest, no evidence can ever correct.

Is it moral to kill a depressed idler? What if a psychopath does it? A utilitarian would say yes, if the net happiness of society increased — but nobody could ever know that it had.

Even if happiness could be measured, utilitarianism would tend towards a state where all the happiness in the world is given to those who can objectively experience happiness the most — based on their neural pathways and sensitivity to relevant neurotransmitters — whilst those who are less emotional are disregarded, deemed unimportant to the well-being of the utilitariat*.

So a utilitarian in power cannot be objective, as the qualia of individuals are impossible to measure. But why can’t everyone just be a utilitarian, then their biases will balance out?

Averaging only works if people’s errors are distributed around the truth. With interpersonal qualia, the truth is unobservable, so there is no reason to assume that their errors cancel rather than compound.

*utilitariat - the stratum of people who benefit from utilitarianism.