I’ve always struggled to agree with economics. I have a masters in economics, but the more I studied it, the less impressed I became. Utility seems like such a weasel word.

I found this table on the interwebs when trying to clarify in my mind about utility:

I hate the terms ‘Kantianism’ and ‘Utilitarianism’, we don’t talk about Christianism. I’m just about ok with Christian because it’s such a well know part of our vocabulary maybe even Judaism, but just sticking ‘ianism’ on everything just creates a language for Philosophers and Economists only.

Lets keep it short and more personal, Kant vs Utility (Bentham & Mill).

Here’s a cleared up, less powerpoint-y, table for you:

	Kant	Utility (Bentham & Mill)
Ethically relevant feature of an act	Its motive	Its consequences
Basic value	Autonomy	Pleasure/happiness
Ethical imperative	Respect autonomy	Promote pleasure/happiness
Choices evaluated from	Chooser’s point of view	Impersonal point of view
Test for ethical correctness	Categorical imperative	Utility calculation

The utility calculation makes Utilitarianism bullshit. You can’t have a calculation for ethical correctness. There’s no maths involved.

I guess they want to know how to judge which is the more ethical between two choices. You can have a rough sense of which is probably better, but there are no proofs.

I can’t be justified in torturing my victims with a p-value of 0.96. Somehow economics thinks you can. You can’t math your way out of the gutter.

You can mess around the edges with money – but that’s it. Economics can help take money off the table as a problem so the rest of us can get on with our lives. But economics should have nothing to say beyond money. Keep your hawks and doves.

I’m definitely on the side of Kant.

Again here hopefully is a clearer table:

Kant	Utility (Bentham & Mill)
Morality of an action/decision is determined by the motivation of the doer	Morality of an action/decision is determined by its consequences
Deontology theory – goodwill/duty/rules	Teleology theory – finality

Utility boils down to:

“The ends justify the means”.

Kant likes people, Bentham & Mill like results.

Good people getting bad results:

• Kant says good
• Utility says bad

Bad people getting good results:

• Kant says bad
• Utility says good

Utility doesn’t like good people who mess up – hellooooo Jesus (his intention was good, but there were lots of bad consequences of Christianity). Utility likes bad people doing good things for selfish reasons – hellooooo capitalism.

Bad people doing good stuff does not make them/it good. They’re playing you. Perhaps there’s short-term gains, but its going to end badly.

Capitalism I guess accepts people are bad and tries to get what it can out of them. Maybe I can see like a tactical short term use for utility. It’s better than a worst case scenario – utility assumes everyone is terrible and needs some way to get along.
The butcher hates the baker but needs bread for his steak sandwich.

I can also see similarities to Islam (Utility) against Christianity (Kant). Islam accepts there will be fighting, so gives rules for warfare. Christianity rejects violence of all kinds which is great in the long term, but allows people to do whatever they want in the mean time whilst claiming that they’re still Christian.

Jesus agrees with Kant. Miyazaki the director of the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke agrees with Kant – bad results doesn’t mean bad guys. The steel town in the film, there are good people there, but they still destroy their surroundings. Utility would call them bad people.

The problem for Kant is measuring motive/goodwill is hard – non-profit isn’t always better than profit. You should focus on the actions and motivation – what they did in the moment, then practice to improve the action. Luck is always in the result. There is no luck in actions. NASA do this. After each mission they consider how much luck played into the success of the mission.

Utility likes to bask in the glory of luck. Do you feel lucky?