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.
Daily reminder that virtue ethics trumps both utilitarianism and deontology for the simple reason that virtue ethics actually consider how people morally behave in real life and offers a solution, if an unsatisfactory one, to bridge the gap between how people act and how people ought to behave. Utilitarians and deontologists will write tl;dr essays on whether to pull the lever but do not have a single framework or methodology to account for people who perform the exact opposite of how they ought to act with respect to the trolley problem. In other words, the utilitarian has nothing to offer if someone doesn’t pull the lever other than writing ever more elaborate polemics on why you should totally pull the lever. Even worse, the utilitarian has no correcting methodology to use if after convincing themselves that they ought to pull the lever, they don’t actually pull the lever at the moment of truth. They don’t understand that ethics is a personal quality that must be cultivated, which means that the utilitarian will continue to not pull the lever despite being absolutely convinced that pulling the lever is the right thing to do.