Instead of dismantling the machine that runs on human blood we will limit the amount of blood to the smallest quantity that can allow the machine to run at maximum capacity.
Ok but I still struggle to see what would be the refutation of utilitarianism in the context of a socialist society. Surely deontology can't be it
I don't think utilitarianism is a useful tool for analyzing structural problems. Which is what I was trying to condense into a funny quip. If you look at Peter Singer, the most prominent modern day utilitarian, you still see that he has terrible takes on pretty much anything geopolitical and isn't an anti-capitalist. I actually don't have a problem with consequentialism generally, but the materialist analysis is just more effective. I have limited philosophical knowledge so I probably can't answer your actual question.
The refutation of utilitarianism is that happiness cannot be measured. Neither can the value of a human life.
The entirety of “utilitarianism” as it is currently practiced relies on the idea that you can, and, because of the lack of concrete numbers for these things, you can literally argue for anything you want with it.
For instance, someone could say that working one hour as a landlord is more painful than working for ten hours as a tenant, because the landlord is less used to working, so landlord work hour = -20 happiness units and prole work hour = -3 happiness units, and then go on to conclude that a worker working for 5 hours is justifiable if it prevents a landlord from working for 1 hour. The problem with this is that everything I just said was entirely made up (and the premise is blatantly false), and the units themselves are never defined, not even in actual examples from self-described utilitarians, fundamentally meaning that this nonsense, outright reactionary take I just used as an example of the flaw of mathematical utilitarian thinking, is exactly as valid as every other equation anyone has done to calculate utilitarianism. The entire concept of calculating happiness is vague nonsense and can only make sense in our commodified world where we’ve reduced everything down to a value.
Utilitarianism sort of works as a general principle, but even then, none of this is getting in to the numerous different kinds of utilitarianism that also argue for entirety different actions at different times, and even entirely different premises
In general, it is typical to liberals to reduce problems to one-dimensional reward in the form of gain. All of these tens of dimensions simply do not count for them
Utilitarianism falls apart completely because it is a purely nuerotypical worldview. People with ADHD and many times autism throw an irreparable cog into the philosophy’s machine. The reasoning of the philosophy simply do not compute with our understanding of the world and how to progress ourselves and society.
Care to get specific?
