Pluralistic: Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things (03 June 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things (03 June 2023)"

Rich People’s Gain is Worth Less Than Poor People’s Pain

A new way to think about utilitarianism, courtesy of the Office of Management and Budget.

A faded, halftoned image of the US Capitol Dome, surmounted by a balance scale. The lower part of the scale is weighed down by a towering Oliver Twist figure, porridge-bowl extended in supplication. He is raising up a scale holding a fan of caricature drawings of a business-suited plutocrat with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.

Utilitarianism — the philosophy of making decisions to benefit the most people — sounds commonsensical. But utilitarianism is — and always has been — an attractive nuisance, one that invites its practitioners to dress up their self-serving preferences with fancy mathematics that “prove” that their wins and your losses are “rational.”

That’s been there ever since Jeremy Bentham’s formulation of the concept of utilitarianism, which he immediately mobilized in service to the panopticon, his cruel design for a prison where prisoners would be ever haunted by a watcher’s unseeing eye. Bentham seems to have sincerely believed that there was a utilitarian case for the panopticon, which let him declare his sadistic thought-experiment (thankfully, it was never built during Bentham’s life) to be a utility-maximizing act of monumental kindness.

Ever since Bentham, utilitarianism has provided cover for history’s great monsters to claim that they were only acting in service to the greater good.

Continue reading "Rich People’s Gain is Worth Less Than Poor People’s Pain"