In a world of blues and greens, utilitarianism seems like a travesty. But it perhaps, instead of blaming utilitarianism for the preferences of the world, we should blame the blues and the greens for having stupid preferences.

Tim, Great quote!

“1. Note by the Author, July 1822.
To this denomination has of late been added, or substituted, the greatest happiness or greatest felicity principle: this for shortness, instead of saying at length that principle which states the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question, as being the right and proper, and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action: of human action in every situation, and in particular in that of a functionary or set of functionaries exercising the powers of Government. The word utility does not so clearly point to the ideas of pleasure and pain as the words happiness and felicity do: nor does it lead us to the consideration of the number, of the interests affected; to the number, as being the circumstance, which contributes, in the largest proportion, to the formation of the standard here in question; the standard of right and wrong, by which alone the propriety of human conduct, in every situation, can with propriety be tried. This want of a sufficiently manifest connexion between the ideas of happiness and pleasure on the one hand, and the idea of utility on the other, I have every now and then found operating, and with but too much efficiency, as a bar to the acceptance, that might otherwise have been given, to this principle. “

That said, the greatest number principle is possible as a rule of action. We can say that we want to make as many people as possible happier with every decision we make. Of course the problem with this is that we are not aiming at maximizing happiness in any way. We could be systematically making the world worse off without violating this principle. Say killing someone makes everyone else better off because it decreases overpopulation. If I kill off everyone in the world (except myself) one at a time, I will not be violating this rule. Thus, I do not care about what actually happens to anyone, I just care about following a rule.

If you aim at “greatest happiness” you actually have a goal. Giving a method of comparing happiness across individuals, it gives a method of weighing the interests of each individual equally. It is therefore the only logical way to understand “public happiness” or “social happiness”. As Bentham said, “It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.”

Going on to your proposed moral framework, it sounds a lot like preference utilitarianism. “Lives” or “life projects” are not very specific. Are you arguing that people’s preferences matter, not their mental states (a la preference utilitarianism)? If not, are you arguing that only specific preferences matter? If so, how do you determine which ones matter? Furthermore, I’m not sure what valuing preference satisfaction has to do with rejecting aggregation. Those two are completely separate.

You start your theory off with: “Don’t start with “greatest happiness.” Start with “greatest number.” The greatest number of people in society is, well, everybody—each individual, that is. So we’re thinking about each person. Got it? Now we move on to “greatest happiness.” For each person, we want the greatest happiness, for them. For each person, we’re going to try to see it their way.” That is exactly how utilitarianism does it. But it has nothing to do with the greatest number principle. Again as Bentham says, utilitarianism is about considering each and every individual. We want to maximize happiness for every person. The problem is, sometimes what makes one person happier makes another less happy. So you need some way of determining how to make the trade-off. Utilitarianism says we want to maximize aggregate happiness, which makes the most sense to me. Any principle in which we are not supposed to maximize aggregate happiness means that certain people are valued more than others based on some circumstance.

Your example of Gary and Lucy poses two problems. The rule you are using for this situation means that we cannot do anything which makes anyone worse off. The first problem is that this is not a goal, but a rule of action, and is problematic in a way similar to the rule in which we are required to make as many people as possible happier. That is, we could continue to follow this rule and drive everyone as a whole into greater and greater misery by failing to help anyone when someone else might get hurt. The second problem with this is that, this rule is impossible to follow because instead of a rule which says to make as few people as possible worse off, you want to make no-one worse off. For almost every decision, however, there will be someone who is negatively affected no matter what you chose.

You propose to solve the second problem with compensation for anyone who is made worse off. Presumably, this is a paired decision – that is, every decision which hurts someone must have a paired decision which compensates those people. Utilitarianism would be rather indifferent about compensation if it would work because the distribution of utility doesn’t matter. However, redistribution of utility is impossible without losing some utility along the way.

Happiness/preference satisfaction is simply not redistributable like money is. For example, the compensation cannot be monetary unless money produces the same marginal utility for the people who lose it and the people who gain it. Because of diminishing marginal utility, compensation of wealthier people by less wealthy people is bound to result in a reduction of aggregate utility. More fundamentally, almost all redistribution requires effort or results in some cost. Any effort can be used to generate utility, so effort used to merely redistribute utility is wasted utility. Thus, if we try to redistribute utility there must be a loser, and if we try to compensate that loser there is another loser. Compensation of all losers is impossible because compensation continually reduces the available utility. (The only way it would work would be if the compensation creates utility as a side effect. If it created exactly enough utility as a side effect to compensate for the opportunity cost of compensation, utilitarianism would be indifferent about it. If it created more than the opportunity cost, it would be required by utilitarianism. Less, and it would be immoral.)

Your solution to these problems seems to be to get rid of the compensation requirement. Compensation would be nice, you say, but not required. Then you say if three people gain from an act, and one person loses a little bit, the act is still moral. The problem is what constitutes “just a little worse off”, and why this degree of “worse off” is not arbitrary. It makes sense to me that the act is moral if the gains to the three people are larger than the loss to the one. Anything short of that constitutes unequal consideration; why should the one matter more than the three?