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I might be getting my memory mixed up, checking the wiki, I've not read Interesting Times. I was going from memory of Guards Guards. But apparent it was Suffer-Not-Injustice Stoneface Vimes (what a name) who killed the king and ushered in the age of Patrician-Tyrants. I think Vetinari's general vibe is more that he is supremely pragmatic. Killing and torture, is a tool in his toolbox, I got the impression it's not his favorite but he wouldn't also not. There has a certain moral compass to it, not necessarily evil, but also not really good either.
I don't think he as a person recognizes good and evil - unlike e.g. Vimes who does. Vimes is lawful good, Vetinari is lawful neutral - he's just optimizing for certain functions (prosperity of AM, preservation of his own rule, manageability in order to achieve the above) and if somebody needs to be tortured, so be it, but there's no pleasure in it. Basically ideal common good maximizer, with common good defined by him alone, only Pratchett writes him as actually hypercompetent, so his understanding of common good is pretty close to the actual common good. If people like that could really exist, they'd probably made not a bad king, too bad it's all fantasy.
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Vetinari is possibly good in a utilitarian sense, just not in most virtue or deontological senses. The vibe I get is a cynical "it's okay for me to be bad enough to prevent my being replaced with something even worse". He does seem to be grooming people like Vimes and von Lipwig to actually make things better, but even his attempts to delegate strike me as a mix of pessimism ranging from "I could retire before I'm killed if things go well enough" to "I could need scapegoats if things go poorly enough"
Yes, in the the utilitarian sense if we include the caveat that he is, without a doubt, an egoist. He does want what is best for Ankh-Morpork, but what is best for Ankh-Morpork is Him. Common failure state of Tyrants in general. The city is lucky he is a philosopher-king. I think he wants competent people doing stuff, idk if its exactly retiring or scapegoats as much that recognizes talent, he's very good at finding and applying leverage, talent working for you makes things easier and better for the city. Happy populaces means less attempts to overthrow him.
Yeah, but the trouble is that the other failure state is "when the tyrant is gone, people fighting over the power vacuum tear the place apart". Monarchy (with one well-defined rule of succession or another) was actually a valuable social technology at one point, and it's one that Ankh-Morpork doesn't currently have access to!
It's entirely possible that, even if Vetinari decides that Carrot (or someone else, considering Carrot's objections) would be a better leader, he still doesn't see any way he can name a successor and retire or die without that successor being under more threat than he was and the city needing a successor to the successor in short order.
It's a shame we never got to see how Pratchett would have had things all turn out. I like the "Vetinari tries to leave von Lipwig in charge, and Moist weasels out of it by hastily inventing democracy" fan theory, personally. That's not a story, though; you could describe most of the Discworld plots that plainly and unimpressively. The stories didn't get great until you got down into the details.
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