CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Thus, from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, utilitarian philosophy became
embedded in capitalism and the utility calculation became embedded
in economics. Briefly, it went from:
• Bentham’s greatest good for the greatest number, coupled with ends
justifying means and selective sacrifice, to
• Mill’s expanding utility from quantity to quality of advantages, to
• Jevons’ focusing on the “calculus of pleasure and pain” and admonishing
that “we must hold to the dry old Jeremy,” to
• Sidgwick’s trying to bridge both utilitarianism and economics at
Cambridge, to
• Marshall’s locating money and “mathematical fitness for analysis” at
the center of an unbiased economics discipline, to
• Pigou’s fastening these components onto gross national product.
Utilitarianism arose at the same time as capitalism, was seen to be far
more accommodating than Adam Smith’s ethics, and supported the drive toward
“maximizing,” however narrowly anyone chose to interpret outcomes.
It allowed ends to vindicate means and recognized the usefulness of selective
sacrifice. It reinforced the supposed “calculus” of summed advantages and
thus easily meshed into already preferred patterns of trade and investment.
There utilitarianism continues to reside today within western capitalism. We
never give it a moment’s thought.
And the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism have not essentially
changed since their early formation. Economics has greatly matured, but
capitalism is stuck in a set of rationalizations that reach all the way back to
the 1700s and 1800s.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY UTILITY
Philosophy Becomes Culture 319
So what happened to utility and utilitarianism in the twentieth century?
Briefly, attempts to produce utility calculations, summing up usefulness and
advantage, contributed to pushing economics along the path to becoming a
science. Utilitarianism itself split into a dozen competing branches. Capitalists