IN DEFENCE OF SILLY

Smack the Pony’s Sally Phillips is fighting back against a no-nonsense world of winners and losers, tests and measurements – and snakes and ladders

I am waging a quiet campaign against Utilitarianism. Not that it’s noticed. Utilitarianism was a philosophy introduced by a strange man called Jeremy Bentham who loved measuring things and thought you could calculate happiness. He reckoned that you could make your moral decisions based on how many people would be made happy by the result. If 19 people were made happy by course of action A, and 18 by course of action B, then you should choose Action A. You only have to look at Brexit and Trump to see the flaw in this argument. The takeover by stealth of Utilitarian thinking means that we are now a people that thinks the idea of society having winners and losers is inevitable. We measure everything from the number of steps we take to the…

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The Big Issue United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, 7/9/2018

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