> Problem one: Utilitarianism is bullshit. Jeremy Bentham invented utilitarianism, designed the Panopticon model prison, and lives on as a dried out lich in a c

> Problem one: Utilitarianism is bullshit. Jeremy Bentham invented utilitarianism, designed the Panopticon model prison, and lives on as a dried out lich in a chair that they still wheel out for board meetings at University College London because he wanted to win a posthumous argument about whether he could have utility after he was dead. > > You just can't build on a foundation that rotten. I don't think you made a good argument. Whether utilitarianism is a good thing or not doesn't really depend on the quirkiness or even failures of its originator. Whether it works or fails depends on what it does now, not where it came from. If you dig deep enough most any idea can be traced back to something unpalatable, or to be applied in some horrifying way, and this is certainly true in morality. So for instance while people often make thought experiments about what if doctors used healthy people for spare parts, deontology isn't really that much prettier. Deontology doesn't care for any amount of consequences, so if there's any way whatsoever for the system to come to the conclusion that "X group aren't people", then any amount of carnage and suffering becomes acceptable.