Why Neoliberal Utilitarianism Is Making Us All Depressed

Neil Vallelly joins Emma Vigeland to discuss utilitarianism and how this 18th-century philosophy is still impacting us today.

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How does one feel at peace in society when your identity or your success in that Society is fundamentally tied to your utility and oftentimes maximizing your utility as you talk about in your book as well is just fundamentally impossible? So it's it might it's that in and of itself is quite alienating. Yeah very much so. and that's the kind of and that so that that's where I'm trying to get with the ID if utilitarianism and extending it Beyond so the experience of students is that like the more and more you kind of examine kind of contemporary Society you realize that so many of us are engaged in activities that that columnists would describe as maximizing our utility. So working at a point where so many people are kind of working longer than ever. beyond the hours that are actually paid for. So many people are trying to learn new skills. Get an education so on and so forth getting into debt. And doing so and as they keep doing this it seems like our kind of collective the common goods is dismantled at the same time by a kind of neoliberal capitalism. And part of the trajectory that I try to map in the book is from this idea of what we call utilitarianism. Which many people should have heard of. and I don't want to necessarily delve into the kind of boring political economy history of utilitarianism. But I was planning on it. I was planning on it. yeah. great! we can fill our boots with Jeremy Benthem and… yes exactly. Yeah but the basic premise of utilitarianism is that if each individual maximizes their utility then it'll lead to the greatest happiness of the most significant number of people. It's a kind of majoritarian Ethics. And there are deep problems with that idea. Which I can identify in the book. But what I argue is that with neoliberalism we have flipped into a form of utilitarianism. We're actually we're individuals as individuals maximize our own individual utility which actually leads to the act of deconstructing the common goods of the greatest happiness. So it ultimately leads to the most significant unhappiness and the greatest number of people.