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Fr Dwight Longenecker wrote:
When utilitarian solutions are applied at the personal level, we feel in our bones the ultimate cruelty of this philosophy. More chillingly, the utilitarian does not regard himself as being cruel. According to his lights, he is being kind--and doing so more efficiently. In seeking the greatest good for the greatest number, he judges each of his actions quantitatively. For him, what is large is always better than what is small. A large group of people is worth more than any individual, as a flock of ninety-nine sheep is much more important than the single one who wanders off lost (see Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7).
There is just one fatal flaw in the utilitarian’s arithmetic: Every group, herd, or flock is made up of individuals. A man with no respect for the individual will have no respect for the group, since zero times ninety-nine still comes out to zero.
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This passage from Fr Dwight Longenecker's essay on utilitarianism in
Disorientation: The 13 "Isms" That Will Send You to Intellectual La-La Land quite nicely sums up what is wrong with utilitarianism, and the host of political and economic philosophies (among other things) which are based on it. Aside from being militantly anti-Christian, Marxism is at root a utilitarian philosophy of society; so is socialism, though this latter system is is anti-Christian only to the extent that individuals don't count.
The very basis of utilitarianism, "the greatest good for the greatest number" betrays that individuals do not, in the final scheme, count. The implication is that any who stand in the way of this "greatest good" need to be thrust aside: their rights do not count. Indeed, their very lives do not count, and so if "the greatest good" requires their extermination, then so be it. The "greatest good" of Nazi Germany required the sacrifice of the Jews for the good of the Nazi party and of Germany, and so the gas chambers were built. The "greatest good" of the workers' paradise in the Soviet Union required fewer Ukrainians, and so a famine was engineered; and it required fewer dissidents against the "people's" government (which did, after all, displace the short-lived government by the people in Russia), and so the gulags were formed.
So far I have noted the problems of utilitarianism as practiced by totalitarian tyrants, be they Fascists and National Socialists or Marxists and Communists. But this does not do full justice to the challenge of totalitarianism, because if the truth is told, Capitalism can breed its own utilitarian dystopia. I've said before that socialism treats every human as little more than another mouth to feed. Capitalism, on the other hand, treats every person as a cog in the economy, valuable only to the extent that he is producing wealth and not just consuming it (Marxism is ultimately the combination of these two philosophies). Taken to its dystopian extreme, this means that every man is a source of work only, and so should be used as efficiently as possible. In much of the world, this has been taken to the extreme of slavery (albeit before Adam Smith articulated the principles of Capitalism), or to inhumane working conditions for free men. Capitalism is, in the end, the worst kind of economic system except for all those others which have already been tried.
Neither democratic Capitalism nor any of the Marxist/socialist/fascist tyrannies ultimately promote the common good. In the founding of America, this was recognized by the establishment of a Constitution mean to protect the common good; and this document, though helpful in this regards, was ultimately incomplete. One need look no further than the continued existence of the institution of slavery to see that even a constitution geared towards the common good, written by some very smart men, still falls quite short of actually protecting the common good in all cases. It did, however, help America succeed in the area where France's revolution failed, which was the maintenance of some semblance of order, some protection of the common good.
Inevitably, "the greatest good for the greatest number" must come into conflict with the common good. For utilitarianism is but a cheap substitute for the common good, because the common good makes the claim that every individual ultimately matters, that the rights of an individual in a group are as important--or even more important--than the rights of the group. Indeed, as Fr Longenecker notes, the rights of the group are ultimately contingent on the rights of the individual.
Thus we see that in a utilitarian system, people are used as means to an end. This is true whether that end is the generation of wealth as in Democratic Capitalism or in the pursuance of a Proletariat's Utopia as in Marxism or in the creation of a Golden Age for the Chosen People as in Hitler's Third Reich. And if a person may be used, then he is ultimately expendable once he ceases to contribute, no matter how great his service. The most important gear in a machine is ultimately replaceable when it breaks, and so will be discarded once the machine's operation slows. It's value is only as an interchangeable part, and thus it counts for nothing but refuse once it ceases to work: which is precisely how men are treated in a society which views them as cogs and not people. If they have no intrinsic value, then ultimately they will be discarded: especially if these people are seen as obstacles to progress or the generation of wealth. Once one person counts for nought, the rest of humanity will follow, for as Fr Longenecker notes, zero times any number is still zero.
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Note: This originally appeared on my Equus Nom Veritas blog. It can be viewed in its original format (with links) there.
Tags: Culture Quote Political-Philo Sophy
