Early capitalist theorists like Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer believe that under free market systems, individuals would pursue their own selfish needs, but through market exchange and competition, society as a whole would benefit. Adam Smith, being an economist, focused on how trade and competition would set prices in a way that reflected the value of the work put into producing goods, and the society's desire for any given good. For example, if society was producing too much wheat, and not enough sugar, a capitalist would notice that with the same amount of labor he could switch to growing sugar and make more money, because the price of sugar would be higher relative to how much you could produce with the same amount of work. Through the selfish desire to make more money, labor would be allocated in a way that would correctly reflect what a society's wants and needs were. Herbert Spencer was more of a sociologist, and focused on how competing firms would either die out or prosper based on how good they were at what they were doing. So for two competing sugar farms, if one was inefficient, lazy, or incompetent, and the other was well run, the incompetent one wouldn't be able to survive in a market economy and would close down. He saw this as a good thing, because then society as a whole would evolve in a similar way to organisms over time, towards better and better practices, due to the free market "killing off" weaker, more poorly managed companies. He coined the term "survival of the fittest", and thought a free market system was what would improve society in this way.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for his social contract theory, where he argued that we must submit to the rule of law (even to a monarch) in order to prevent an "all against all" society, essentially giving up some degree of freedom for the security of living in a society. People like Rousseau argued that before advanced civilization people lived in relative peace because we are naturally cooperative, and Adam Smith thought that our natural moral sentiments, which are grounded in the discomfort we would feel in knowing a neutral third party observer would disapprove of our bad actions, is what keeps people behaving justly.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for his social contract theory, where he argued that we must submit to the rule of law (even to a monarch) in order to prevent an "all against all" society, essentially giving up some degree of freedom for the security of living in a society. People like Rousseau argued that before advanced civilization people lived in relative peace because we are naturally cooperative, and Adam Smith thought that our natural moral sentiments, which are grounded in the discomfort we would feel in knowing a neutral third party observer would disapprove of our bad actions, is what keeps people behaving justly.
"Imagine, the universe is going to recur eternally over and over again, and you will somehow never get any less stupid."
What if being a Utilitarian makes you sad? We should probably kill all the Utilitarians just to be safe.
A lot of the critiques of Utilitarianism, the doctrine that we should try to create a world that maximizes happiness, point out the bizarre and inhuman actions that we would seemingly have to accept if we accepted the theory. For example, we can imagine that if we wanted to maximize happiness, it would be morally justified, and perhaps even required, to murder and healthy person and harvest their organs in order to save five people. After all, five lives are more valuable than one, so even if it doesn't seem like justice, we should kill one person to save the five. However, as the comic points out, you don't even need to get five people involved. It seems as though a single happy person is intrinsically "worth" more than a sad one, so we should even kill one person who is sad to save one that is happy. All in all, utilitarianism usually sounds great when people first hear about it, and the theory really only suffers from one minor flaw - no one wants to live in a world where we actually believe it is true.
A lot of the critiques of Utilitarianism, the doctrine that we should try to create a world that maximizes happiness, point out the bizarre and inhuman actions that we would seemingly have to accept if we accepted the theory. For example, we can imagine that if we wanted to maximize happiness, it would be morally justified, and perhaps even required, to murder a healthy person and harvest their organs in order to save five people. After all, five lives are more valuable than one, so even if it doesn't seem like justice, we should kill one person to save the five. However, as the comic points out, you don't even need to get five people involved. It seems as though a single happy person is intrinsically "worth" more than a sad one, so we should even kill one person who is sad to save one that is happy. All in all, utilitarianism usually sounds great when people first hear about it, and the theory really only suffers from one minor flaw - no one wants to live in a world where we actually believe it is true.
"Please...no! No more examples of teaching primitive language games, I give up, I'll tell you anything!"
"Okay fine, I agree, it is not yet proven false that Einstein would have had a catch with me whenever I wanted."