Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Philosophy, Noosphere and Ciberculture.

Utilitarianism essentially sees social logic only for the goods they produce, as well as many currents of modernity, what is important is objectivity, the actual relationship with objects, and the essence of Being, its relation to the Other, and its culture. .

It thus becomes a dispute for power, money and mobilizing forces for the production of goods, no matter how these goods are distributed among different people, in different positions on the social scale, from different religious or cultural postures.

Professor Julia Markovits of Cornell University’s class, which gives an introduction to the moral aspects of utilitarianism, explains that one of the reasons that a simple disappointment of football fans together could produce a greater devaluation than a person’s pain would mean loss of values ​​associated with the soccer team, while the pain is only of the person.

He explains that according to philosopher Robert Nozick, the “utility monster” can transform an extremely good person, who transforms resources in direct relation to happiness, when more money and food we give to this person, the happier he is, but in the limit this It does not transform all ordinary people into a happy “general collectivity” because of utility.

The answer to utilitarianism is that this will not happen, because the opposite is true, the more resources we have the less impact any additional resources will have on our happiness.

If we think about accumulation this is not what happens, how much impact it has on a mega tech company account, while the same $ 100 can make a difference to a child in a poor region of the planet.

The subject may seem psychological or even sociological, but Robert Nozick was interested in the discussion of the state, so his book is called “Anarchy, State and Utopia” (2011), its original version is from 1974, so long before the fall of the Berlin wall, changes in Russia and the western world.

Nozick’s unique argument is that man chose to leave the “state of nature” and set up a kind of state whose existing morality consists of a future Minimum State, where some “laws” would work automatically, since of course it is no longer possible.

Apart from Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on “The Monarchy of Fear,” little or no literature penetrates the current conjuncture about the return of states as a force of repression and “order” to re-establish possible harmony.

He says of victims of injustice, including those practiced by the state: “What is permissible for victims of injustice to do in order to rectify the injustices committed against them, including the large number of injustices committed by people acting through government? I do not know of a complete or theoretically sophisticated approach to these issues. ”(NORZICK, 2011, p. 195).

He is the only author to criticize John Rawls’s utilitarianism on the issue of distribution and the only author to include in his critique Bernard Williams’s text on the fact that the state’s only action on inequality is the question of disease, curiously. Obama’s health plan that was attacked by Donald Trump. Addressing even Utopia, Nozick states that: “Life is not a race where everyone competes for a prize pre-set by someone…” (NOZICK, 2011, p. 305).

NOZICK, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Sao Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2011. The following video explains these arguments, the 3rd. Julia Markovitz’s class about utilitarism:

The idea that it was consumerism and the production of goods in modernity that led humanity to a wave of accumulation of goods or capital is not entirely true, the fact that this was done as a way of feeding a capital-based society is rather one part of the matter, the other is what is thought of as life and happiness.
This current as an ethical doctrine that argues that goods promote happiness is not the one that arises from the beginning, liberalism defends usury and capitalization at first, the novels by Honoré de Balzac, which even Marx liked to read, show this anatomy of society liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, utilitarianism later matured with the idea that goods lead to greater happiness, notably with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).
In Balzac’s novels the figures of Father Goriot, named in the Human Comedy organized by the Brazilian Paulo Rónai, received in the Portuguese edition the name of Uncle Goriot, is a novel that two ungrateful daughters take everything from their father after leaving him (they were not even on their deathbed) they spend their goods on true liberalism in Paris in 1819, the period of the restoration of the French Bourbon monarchy.
Father Gouriot says on his deathbed: “Ah, my friend, do not marry, have no children! you give them life and they give you death, ”as they see their daughters spend their accumulated possessions. It is not unique to this period, as in King Lear also we note that two daughters also abandon their father because of his throne and only one will follow faithful to their father, and the Shakespeare period to remember is around the year 1605.
Utilitarianism is thus a current born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that influenced the idea that more goods is more happiness, from this the idea that more development must also be a greater social production of goods, not forgetting that this is only an aspect of happiness.
Mill was a member of the British Parliament in 1865, and defended individual rights, including petitioning to extend the vote to women, so this defense is initially the defense of a liberal right.
Even the studies of political economy were done by Mill, who was an economist, having studied Adam Smith, David Ricardo, the physiocrats and mercantilism, and is not, therefore, an exclusivity of Marx, which is in some way aligned with Mill’s thinking, essentially in the aspect of economicism and utilitarianism, they lack the human aspect.
Interestingly, Stuart Mill defends the distribution of wealth, he writes verbatim: “The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society,” which is in volume 2 of its Principles of Political Economy (1983).
Julia Markovits (Cornell University) presents video an introduction to the moral theory of utilitarismo: