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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.
There's really no reason to be surprised that utilitarians could be right-wing if you accept that some people will genuinely end up having different terminal values by which they calculate utility.
There is also a strong intellectual tradition of objecting to centralized government actions on the basis of their pure inability to deliver superior results compared to simply leaving things alone and declining to act at all. On top of the occasional tendency to genocide, wage wars of conquest, and steal from their own population. China is currently doing a genocide, Russia is doing a war of conquest, and seems both Lebanon and Sri Lanka governments were robbing their citizens blind, so these are clearly not relics of the past.
Some observed problems that government programs tend to contribute or be vulnerable to:
Increasing fragility
Black swans
Unintended consequences
Calculation problems
Lack of skin in the game (i.e. who suffers consequences for failure?)
Principal-agent problems
Regulatory capture
to name a few. Most of these have to do with the pure lack of reliable information about the sectors they're trying to govern and the inability to effectively use that information towards the best ends.
Most of these can be solved or mitigated by decentralizing and localizing governance, rather than depending on a single 'point of failure' which can drag everyone down.
In short, there's a fallacy that often occurs when analyzing most government-sponsored programs where the costs are hidden but the benefits are obvious. One of the scarier things about government is it's ability to shove those costs into the medium-term future so nobody in the present notices them OR to slough them off onto one particular subset of society so that anyone outside that subset doesn't really care about the costs and ignores them. Governments which have to periodically win elections particularly have an incentive to do this so as to maintain their rule.
Lets use the obvious example with all those direct 'welfare' payments during COVID, where money was sent out directly to everyone, and many employers got 'free' loans to maintain their payrolls.
Back at the time I'm sure you'd say "The utilitarian case for making direct payments to citizens and employers is strong on its face!"
And then two years hence, we have 8-9% inflation which eats up everyone's wages and makes EVERYONE poorer than they would have been otherwise.
Whoops? Are you, the good and faithful Utilitarian, tallying these costs up against the previous welfare program, or are you treating these new problems as completely novel and utterly unrelated to the earlier actions the government took, and thus still believing that the previous programs were obviously the correct and best action?
Utilitarians should care about ALL costs and benefits, even (especially?) the hidden ones.
So if you're being an honest utilitarian, and you are doing an honest assessment of a given program, it is completely possible to conclude that the overall impact of a given program was in fact a net negative and the world would have been better off had said program never been implemented.
This is especially true if you're a Free Market fundamentalist and believe that in the alternative scenario where the market had been allowed to act we would have landed on a vastly superior solution.
So perhaps the right wing utilitarians are doing a very comprehensive census of all of the detectable pros and cons in our current system and are seeing a very, very large locus of dis-utility centered around the government where it becomes clear that almost all of the functions it serves are throwing off negative externalities and causing dead-weight loss and only gets worse over time.
And thus, the conclusion becomes that if most government programs are a net negative and should not exist, this logic also applies to the government as a whole.
Honestly, I'm increasingly surprised and disheartened that utilitarians have lived through the years 2020 and 2021, got to observe the government interfering and bungling EVERY SINGLE STEP of the pandemic response, from lying to people about the nature of the disease to delaying deployment of vaccines to shutting down schools even after danger had passed.
And some of them still somehow conclude that Governments ought to be primarily responsible for disease and pandemic response.
I'm not a utilitarian, libertarian, or marxist, so your arguments do not convince me.
In pure curiosity, what sort of evidence or argument do you find convincing?
Establish your facts and construct a reasonable argument that can be derived from those facts without needing to make leaps to conclusions.
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