Utilitarianism is the dominant philosophy in public discourse in the United States.
And it’s nonsense.
Utilitarianism claims that the morally correct action is the one which results in the greatest good.
All this does, from a decision-making perspective, is kick the can down the road from judging the moral value of actions to judging the moral value of the results. You still need some other philosophy alongside it by which to judge those results, so Utilitarianism doesn’t offer any simplification or new criteria.
This is what all Consequentialist Ethics do: using the result to justify the action, rather than judging an action on its own merits.
It just shifts the moral judgement from the action to the result.
Which means that, in the eyes of any Consequentialist system, as long as the results are positive you can justify any horrific action.
And in non-technical-philosophy-speak we have a term for doing that.
It’s called “the End justifying the Means”.
And even children know it’s wrong.
