CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

324 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
utilitarians the goal of maximizing well-being ultimately determines what is
just and unjust.” 31 “For utilitarians, it is not rights, but the promotion of
welfare, that lies at the heart of morality.” 32 “As . . . critics argue, utilitarianism
too easily permits one person’s happiness to be sacrificed for the benefit
of others. It ignores considerations of justice and fairness or, at best, subordinates
them entirely to the principle of utility.” 33
Utilitarianism places utility—usefulness, the sum of advantages, the
greatest good—above other considerations. It makes justice an ancillary issue,
deflected and demoted to a matter of lesser substance. If the greatest
good is served by withholding justice from some, then justice can be sacrificed
to expediencies that serve the greater good of others.
I do not find within utilitarianism—a philosophy that approves selective
sacrifice and ends warranting means—adequate reason to avoid harming
others if that serves by a larger factor to benefit myself. A utilitarianism
that does not start with justice finds it very difficult to end with justice.
Much of this book is about rampant illegality and resulting global
poverty and inequality. In other words, ends absolving means for some and
pernicious consequences for others. This is the essence of my criticism of
utilitarianism: Making justice secondary to anything contributes to an unjust
world.
In the Congo section earlier, I wrote about captive labor being forced
to mine coltan, a mineral used in cell phones and other electronic devices.
There are other sources of the ore, but these sites and their production
methods are particularly low cost. What do utilitarians say about this?
“Suppose for instance that sacrificing the basic interests of one person
somehow saves each of a large number of other people from some small
loss, and that these losses, though individually slight, are cumulatively sufficient
to justify the cost imposed on the one person. Critics [of utilitarianism]
charge that it would be unfair to sacrifice this person for the
benefit of others. Would it? . . . [U]tilitarians can accept the idea that in
principle we would be justified . . .” 34 “Justified” in maintaining captive labor
so the purchase price of your cell phone and the phones of I-don’tcare-how-many
others can be a few cents cheaper? It is the willingness to
justify such acts under any circumstances that leads easily to justifying
such acts under many circumstances.
Justice and rights make utilitarians uncomfortable, because they are a
priori, subjective and not easily calculable. Some modifications to the stan-