Sunday, March 30, 2014

I-We and My-Our

Mill's Utilitarian calculus is indifferent to both the production and the distribution of General Happiness.  In contrast, both factors are implicit in Bentham's version, in which the General Happiness is the sum of Individual Happinesses, each of which is a product of self-interested endeavor.  However, this version is vulnerable to a Marxist criticism that cites cases of non-correspondence between benefactor and beneficiary, e. g. when the producer of surplus-value is not identical to someone who profits from it.  So, neither version of Utilitarianism adequately represents the Production-Distribution relation that at least in part determines the data of its calculus.  Instead, that relation can be derived from that between the I-We relation and the My-Our one, the possibility of an alternative to which is not obvious.  In any case, as is, a weakness of Utilitarianism is a consequence of an inattention to the I-We relation that is typical in Modern Philosophy.

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