Utilitarianism, which was supposed to be the most precise and hard-headed of moral arguments, turns out to be the most speculative and arbitrary. For we have to assign values where there is no agreed valuation, no recognised hierarchy of value, no market mechanism for determining the positive or negative worth of different acts and outcomes. Suppose we agree that justice is not in fact beyond measure, invaluable. Then we have to find some way of measuring it, of fixing, for example, the moral cost of murder. How do we do that? Is the cost eight or twenty-three or seventy-seven? Eight or twenty-three or seventy-seven of what? We have no unit of measurement and we have no common or uniform scale.
Michael Walzer offers a concise critique of utilitarianism, especially in a time of crisis.
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