CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

dard model attempt to incorporate these concepts but still hesitate to place
them ahead of beloved utility.
Utilitarianism rationalizes unjust results. In my view this subordination
of fair play to maximizing outcomes voids any possibility of success for utilitarianism
in the real world that I know. The justification of injustice is a fatal
flaw.
Cannot Be Operationalized
My second objection is that there is no way to make the doctrine function in
daily life. Measuring utility is dependent on calculations of pleasure and
pain, advantage and disadvantage. Since Jeremy Bentham, 200 years of effort
have failed to produce even a vaguely sensible mathematical formula.
The young Caroline Foley showed that utility calculations are impossibly
complex, and no one has since solved the problem. The theory is conditional
on summing up or ranking happiness, pleasure, advantage, whatever,
and it cannot get to that point.
Not all philosophers feel it is necessary to offer ideas that can realistically
be put into general use. I fully respect the satisfaction of pondering a
problem whether such an exercise has any application at all. However, Peter
Singer, a distinguished utilitarian philosopher at Princeton, argues the opposite
case: “[A]n ethical judgment that is no good in practice must suffer from
a theoretical defect as well, for the whole point of ethical judgments is to
guide practice.” 35 For his own philosophy, then, the “theoretical defect” is
the fact that the “ethical judgment” cannot be put into “practice.” The ethical
judgment cannot be made because it is dependent on a calculation that
cannot be performed.
Utilitarianism starts on the wrong foot and lays out a path that cannot
be traversed. It wants to sum advantages but cannot say how to do so. On
just these grounds, it has already overstayed its welcome.
Can Only Be Misapplied
Philosophy Becomes Culture 325
A third objection to utilitarianism is that inherent in the program is
its own inevitable misapplication. A formula that calls for the greatest
good for the greatest number is impossible to implement. What happens
then is that the formula is almost always reinterpreted to mean the