When Utilitarianism becomes mob rule

"We are all Benthamites now!" declared my Criminal Law lecturer at university. And never has the axiom that the way measure right and wrong is the greatest happiness for the greatest number been more popular.

Just as Bentham preserved himself for the benefit of future generations, his ideas has been kept alive for years until they would find themselves an enthusiastic audience in the age of the algorithm. Amongst techy types morality being a mere calculation makes more sense then in years gone by.

It is a good maxim to judge one's personal actions by – I at least attempt to make moral decisions in life by asking: "What will benefit the most amount of people for the longest period of time?"

The problem is that utilitarianism has a propensity to dip into the tyranny of the majority by sacrificing the individual for the collective.

To use an extreme example, if you were to go back in time and ask the parents that sacrificed their child to bring about a bountiful harvest they would have seen themselves as making the moral choice. After all, the harvest helps everyone.

Even more troubling is that utilitarian claims the mantel of the rational form of morality. Many critics of liberalism (or post-liberals) say this about liberalism: that it is a form of morality that doesn't recognise that it is being moral. But it would be more aptly levelled at utilitarianism where rationalisation reigns supreme and ethics is merely a question of counting the amount of happiness to suffering and taking action based on what helps the majority.

Liberalism on the other hand – and the individual rights that it is based on – in many ways is the inverse to utilitarianism (despite the fact that they seem to share the same proponents). A true liberal would not sacrifice the individual for whatever greater good is purported to be gained from it. The is no rationalisation that could justify silencing someone, or taking away their life, choice, or violating their personhood.

The problem with turning ethics into a counting game is that what is counted as producing "happiness" requires a value judgment and one that the proponents of this form of morality seem to be unaware that they are making (at least if you base your morality on some priors not shared by others - e.g. religion - you are more likely to recoginse that your priors may be different to other peoples).

A perfect example of this was the decision to count cases of COVID-19 as the proper metric to judge the utility of the pandemic response. Why was that amount of debt acquired or children out of school or mental health admissions considered to have no bearing on people's "happiness". Who decided that "zeroCOVID" equated to "100% happiness"?

More recent is the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, that assumes that public health messaging is so important and infallible that silencing any contrary views or advice is a public good because it might erode institutional trust.

But what is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander. Even where public health advice is correct for the majority, it is not not necessarily right for the individual. The vast majority of Australians probably could do with being told to lose some weight, but that is not the advice an anorexic needs to hear.

Prohibiting doctors from giving individual advice to their patients that is different to public health messaging could mean – ironically – telling them to do something very bad for their health. I would go so far as to say there is almost no such thing as public health as what is required to make an individual more healthy would depend on the unique circumstances of that person.