The Utilitarian Deception
3rd February 2026
What the philosophers call utilitarianism is actually a family of moral theories with all the feuds, competitiveness and fickle alliances that families tend to have. There may be nuances involved, but there is an intellectual genealogy which takes you from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer, a traceable line of descent. There is no striking family resemblance in play, aside from a presumably congenital moral priggishness.
I need to say straight away, and without apology, that this family’s influence is ubiquitous and pernicious. For any offence against decency you will be sure to find a utilitarian argument lurking in the vicinity, sometimes offering to help clear up the mess it was responsible for in the first place.
Utilitarian thinking is there in the Net Zero climate idolatry, it motivates the new eugenicists of the assisted suicide movement, it underwrites the ridiculous “thought experiments” of the effective altruists.