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I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face. By "strong welfare state" I mean something akin to the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) in which the necessities of life (healthcare, housing, minimum subsistence) are essentially guaranteed, while maintaining a market economy.
Premise #1: We want to maximize pleasure (utility) and minimize pain (disutility).
Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.
Premise #3: Central planning doesn't work very well, so we want to maintain a market economy.
Premise #4: We already have a fairly industrialized, advanced capitalist economy.
ARGUMENT:
Being in poverty is extremely bad for people's wellbeing, both in terms of physical and psychological health. It is extremely unpleasant for people to be homeless or hungry, or having to make decisions like choosing between heat in the winter, medicine, or food. Poverty sucks -- it is painful not being able to afford the essentials of life.
Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.
Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier. Money can't buy love, you can't take it with you, etc. etc. However, charging that guy more in taxes and using those resources to eliminate poverty will make the groups mentioned in #1 and #2 significantly more happy.
We should be OK with high taxes in exchange for eliminating poverty by directly providing the necessities of life for those who cannot afford them. The pain avoided by eliminating poverty outweighs the pain imposed by the taxes (or the pleasure that is lost for the wealthy) because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility. Poverty causes more unhappiness than luxuries cause happiness.
Responses to obvious objections:
a. "Eliminating poverty will cause more pain in the long run because the economy will collapse or at the very least growth will slow, leading to a decline in living standards for everyone." Response: This doesn't seem to have happened in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries have been strong welfare states for a long time and are still very wealthy countries, among the wealthiest in the world. They haven't had their economies collapse from having too many layabouts and such.
b. "Charging me high taxes on wealth I created infringes on my liberties/freedom". Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.
c. "The Scandinavian countries only could do this because they are ethnically homogenous, tightly knit societies. Look at Sweden right now, it's falling apart as they let in more immigrants." Response: This goes more to the political problem with instituting this system rather than the desirability of the system itself. The fact that present-day social democrats are pro immigration does not make immigration a necessary part of a social democracy. One can easily imagine a social democracy with Japan-style immigration restrictions.
d. "I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves, or if they are in the outgroup." Response: This is also not really a utilitarian objection. Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.
As long as utilitarianism is taken to care about future people or even present people's future utility, almost any other ethical system can be emulated in its framework by having the right priors. The operational pattern is something like "I believe [per my prior] that following ethical system X will result in greater technological progress and societal flourishing; therefore by behaving as an X-ian today and convincing other people to also be X-ians, I am actually maximising utility in the long run". In this particular context, a version of this argument that I imagine could be instantiated (and I find fairly persuasive even though I am not, by the standards of almost anyone apart from people deep in SJ, right-wing) is that something among the lines of: "Average (and even median) utility was much lower in {1800, 1400, the stone age...}. Yet, if we had decided to stop and redistribute human wealth equally at those times to maximise local {average, median} utility, the accumulation of capital and centralisation of power that enabled in the industrial revolution/colonialism/transition to agrarian societies would have been prevented and those developments wouldn't have happened, leaving us in an egalitarian but comparatively miserable stasis".
To me personally, one of the more convincing arguments supporting "socialism now, but not when we lived in caves" is something something great stagnation; more than ever before, it feels like we have hit diminishing returns from concentrating capital to enable scientific progress/letting different systems violently duke it out so that the better, more capable one may build a garden on top of the pyramid of skulls/sacrificing to Moloch. Even if further progress is in fact possible, the possible futures don't necessarily look desirable in expectation, with a lot of probability mass being on something like varying AGI apocalypses and easier nukes. Better to switch from explore to egalitarian exploit now and cash out than keep taking the bet?
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