Why Utilitarianism is Self-Defeating

I was going to write a long polemic. Then I realised it's best explained this way: utilitarianism seeks to privilege something of greater value over something of less value, despite the intrinsic nature of the things themselves. It has no intrinsic mechanism for determining such value. Therefore, it is an incomplete thing. And an incomplete thing has less value than a complete thing. So utilitarianism cannot be privileged.

The counterargument is: but what if such a mechanism cannot be found? Well, then utilitarianism is worse — it is lunacy. How could you premise a course of thinking or action on something you believe (at least for the purposes of your argument) cannot be found?

Utilitarianism is not an 'Ethical Theory'

Utilitarianism, to me, has always been a slipshod application of pseudo-mathematics to human behaviour. The basic premise is simple: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation," as one of its founders, Jeremy Bentham said.

However, the question of computing happiness, let alone 'greatest' happiness, has always been a problem — not to mention the problem of linking happiness to morals and legislation. This has always been the main failure of utilitarianism as a positive force.

It turns out that the story is worse than that. Daniel Bartels and David Pizarro, in their 2011 paper The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, published in this summer's Cognition, conclude that utilitarians are mostly (and largely) immoral people.

Here's the latter part of their abstract of the paper:

Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.

It is a chilling conclusion. Whither morality then? Or at least, computational morality.