Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that advocates actions that foster happiness and oppose actions that cause unhappiness. Utilitarianism promotes “the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.”

It’s aim is to maximize the ‘utility’ when deciding what actions to take given a conflict.

This fails on multiple grounds

• It permits aggression — Mixed Law
• It is an ethic based on Parasitism which has to be based on some prior ethic in which initial value must firstly be derived, meaning it cannot tell us anything on what how we should value things but that we can only attempt to steal from people. It is essentially a stolen concept fallacy like saying property is theft (theft requires the prior concept of property) — so it is saying redistribution of goods/services is good without showing how distribution is to be done in the first place
• Fundamentally, it converts data that cannot be converted

The data-type error

“Utility” requires comparing actions on a shared numerical scale, which means human preference has to become ratio data — numbers where 0 is a real zero and arithmetic between values is meaningful (2x, half, etc).

Human preference isn’t that. It’s ordinal data — a ranking with no implied distance between ranks. Your top 10 movies tell you #1 beats #2, not by how much. “Strongly agree” isn’t 2x “agree.” And ordinal data can’t be aggregated across people into a shared scale, because it was never quantitative in the first place — there’s no meaningful sum of “my ranking” and “your ranking.”

Even granting the conversion, ratio data needs a non-arbitrary zero. What is 0 utility? Man acts because of dissatisfaction — a state of zero satisfaction, indifferent to everything, describes no one who’s ever acted. And if 0 utility doesn’t exist for a single person, it certainly doesn’t exist as a common reference point across all of them.

This is the same category error as converting nominal data (“the sky is blue,” “I like Porsche cars”) into a ranking — there’s no criterion to rank statements like that by, because the information needed for the higher data type was never in the lower one. Ordinal preference can no more become cardinal utility than “I like Porsche cars” can become a top-10 list. Utilitarianism isn’t just impractical — the thing it needs to measure doesn’t exist in a measurable form.