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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.
I think there is a fundamental mistake here. This place often engages in utilitarian arguments but I don't think one should then conclude that taking utilitarian arguments seriously actually obliges one to utilitarianism. When taking an assertion by a utilitarian seriously it can but useful to engage with them on their own terms in order to show that even under their framework their doesn't hold merit. For instance if my primary reason for being pro-2A is the ward against tyranny but my interlocutor is attempting to make an argument that making all guns illegal would reduce suffering from interpersonal violence and I think it would not it may be worth my time to engage on this premise because if I win there it's a total victory for my side. More abstractly if policy X is thought to cause A and B and I find A very good and you find B very bad I can either convince you that A outweighs B, which will involve difficult value disputes or I can convince you that B is actually not a consequence on X in which case A obviously dominates. I think a lot of discussion on contentious topics in places like this are of this form, it keeps things in the 'is' rather than 'ought' territory, which is much firmer ground even if not the real bedrock of the disagreement.
I think a lot breaks down at this step. This is simply not how resources work. How much labor and natural resources actually go into that marginal yacht, even buying the shaky premise that marginal yachts are actually what the marginal ultra-wealthy dollar goes to rather than capital reinvestment. Money is an imperfect proxy for resources, one simply cannot transmute yacht materials into quality inner city housing. At best it can modestly reorganize where efforts are spent. You can throw all the money in the world at wringing water from a stone and end up with nothing to show for it.
I'm not really an opponent to welfare spending and quite a fan of things like very generous UBI if designed properly. But I can absolutely see that as things stand in the US where I'm most familiar drastically increasing welfare spending is much more likely to primarily go to lining the pockets of my ideological opponents, big government stooges spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per homeless person to not solve the problem, and until that's changed I have no confidence in any of this utilitarian argumentation until that is fixed. I think the trade you propose is a false one, we will tax the rich more but that tax will primarily be passed down to me as a customer of these rich people and the money taxed will ultimately have nearly no positive utility, and because the problems it attempts to solve will remain I'll see the demand for more taxes that I will ultimately bear will return again and again.
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