Williams's Criticism of the Utilitarian Projects

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I'm not disputing what you're saying as a sort of interpretive point. I think that Williams's critique is saying, look, people genuinely become happy engaging in these second order projects and the utilitarian requirements would not allow them to do that. All I'm saying is that in some cases, those people end up being Wall Street magnets and generating all this money. And yes, if everybody tried to optimize people like that wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have a world in which that is any kind of second order project is the acceptable one. It would always be the wrong thing to do. Unless you were convinced that you ran the numbers. But that would almost never be the case.

David and Tamler take a break from complaining about psychological studies that measure utilitarianism to complain about the moral theory itself. We talk about one of the most famous critiques of utilitarian theories from Bernard Williams. Does utilitarianism annihilate our integrity--our unity--as people? Would trying to maximize well-being fracture our identities, and swallow up our projects, motivations, and moral convictions--the same convictions that make utilitarianism seem appealing in the first place? Is it ultimately self-defeating as a moral theory?

Plus, we talk about the adventures of Tamler's based step-mom Christina Hoff Sommers' at Lewis and Clark law school. Will David stay woke?

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