CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Philosophy Becomes Culture 321
War II and in the decades since, outstanding work in economics has been
done at universities such as Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Michigan,
Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Texas, and many other schools, government
departments, organizations, and, of course, at the Brookings Institution,
under whose roof I am writing this book.
Third, the “unimaginable complexity” of the utility calculation helped
spawn game theory and behavioral economics. These research techniques are
often directed to grasping the interplay between inter- and intrasubjective
components of utilities, demands, decisions, and consumption patterns.
Fourth, perhaps stretching a bit, the difficulty in individual utility calculations
may have had some small role in shifting attention to the national
utility calculation. If the measure of utility for an individual is too problematic,
then the measure of utility for an entire nation offers a welcome refuge.
Some economists have spoken of the usefulness of a single number to summarize
advantages for a group or state. Tom Warke noted that “unambiguous
optimization requires a one-dimensional maximand,” that is, a single
number that can sum up an array of data. 29 In fact, such a number has been
adopted—gross domestic product, or, more exactly, growth in GDP. This
has become, for many people, an acceptable norm for gauging economic
progress and, for others, even a satisfactory indicator of social progress. I am
all for growth in GDP but such a “one-dimensional maximand” carries with
it the relegation of rights and justice to inferior status.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY UTILITARIANISM
Meanwhile, the philosophy of utilitarianism was splintering into multiple
pieces. Many thinkers found the central tenet of the greatest good for the
greatest number, judged by the aftermath of specific acts, to be entirely too
restrictive. They sought variants with different maximizers and different
measures, as they struggled to recast utilitarianism into a more tolerable
framework. My purpose in this section is not to elaborate on each subset
that arose within the scheme, but rather to illustrate briefly the centrifugal
force that seems to be spinning utilitarianism into less pertinent and ever
smaller divisions.
In 1959 Richard Brandt, later at the University of Michigan, introduced
the terms “act” and “rule” to distinguish between two forms of utilitarianism. 30