Classical Utilitarianism is right... it's just immature

[The Voice of Time]

These two videos from Yale University, although mainly the second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0iS4Ax3LXc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkUky5GK7Q8, bring up the subject of utilitarianism and the measure and use of an international unit of "util", or "utility".

A lot of criticism has followed the revelation of classical utilitarianism, and its perception of the world. And it's fair to say, that it's very hard to see how you can relate it to ordinary life in manners that can wholly account for our own sense and understanding of utility in ordinary life, particularly there's a discussion on how you can justify the objective use of utility in society to legitimize bad things.

I'd like to say though, that for all the criticism I've read about, seen or heard about, it all seems to fall down to a simple explanation of what classical utilitarianism really lacks... and that's maturity. I'm gonna disagree with every single criticism of utilitarianism that I can imagine that is based on the central theory (but suggestions and instances derived from that theory I'm not gonna oppose at the moment), for the simple reason that they all seem to merely reflect the insecurity of a world that is not fully understood. That utilitarianism is really right in its theory, it just doesn't know how to account of the instances of our world, because the ones who tries to account for them using utilitarianism, namely "us", are unable to know it in its completeness, this includes ethics, axiology, epistemology, ontology, logic and so forth as well as science...

We simply don't understand what we are trying to measure, and that's what brings out very odd situations like those thought experiments that talks about "but what if <this> happened, would you still be able to agree with utilitarianism?". Because when you take it to extremes, there should be ethical ground we've not yet covered, there should be philosophical- and scientific grounds regarding the axiological nature of things that are missing, that we do not have the knowledge of, and therefore we can't really say what is missing... we're creating a thought experiment, a situation we can't normally study either because it's an unreal situation, a mere conjuring of the mind, and while it may be based on real situations, the circumstances of real situations provide more data for us to account for when we try them out.

Now to end here, I want to demonstrate what I mean. Think of a situation where you have two people and a pool of 50 utils (50 units of utility). The sensitive to pleasure from utility of person A is 1.5 times that of person B, and because of this, person A, as long as his sensitivity remains higher than B's sensitivity, he should have all of those points he can get at a greater sensitivity than B, even if it means all of it. Maybe B is sick and will just vomit while A will survive and live happy ever after. Now abstractly there doesn't seem to be much you can say about this except "B, you're fucked", or "this idea is totally stupid, you can't let B suffer blablabla to satisfy A". However, this is a thought experiment, and in the real world there would be more variables at work that would take it from a local closed-minded situation, to a global situation.

1) First of all, there's the notion of security... if people thought that they could just be discarded like old trash whenever they ran into a bad situation were they pulled others down, they would likely feel insecure, so the mere existence and popularity of the idea that you could say "fuck you B", would have global consequences for people's happiness. It might also give people incentive to cultivate character traits that are undesirable in society, like cowardice.

2) Second of all, there's the doubt and chance of circumstances changing. Sometimes you do get situations where things seem impossible to change the outcome of, and in those situations a hero might rise, or a coward might show himself, but in those situations, if they are predetermined in any manner, like say "person A is basically more valuable to us than person B", you still have the problem in number 1. For this reason, while you may take preference to save somebody in a catastrophe for instance, the effort has to be distributed to such a degree, that if things do not turn out well, the effort spent saving person A instead of B, is marginally higher, to the mere margin, if there is a chance you can stretch out both hands and pull both up before they loose their grip, you have to try, but not so far as to loose person A, but not so far as to give up on person B. In such a situation, people are as safe as possible, because there's nothing more which can be done, but if we discover there is more which can be done, you have the situation all over again, where you have to act in accordance with the maximal effort at not making people feel insecure and/or unsafe in their own society.

3) The last way in which this is a global and not a local problem (and also, to get back to an earlier point, that it's merely a lack of knowledge instead of something wrong with the theory of utilitarianism), is that, say it wasn't life or death, but pleasure, there is a value in seeing other people satisfied. There is a value in knowing that at least you have "something", and at least you'll be given "something" and that people won't just feed the "utility monster" (see video if you don't know the term) because you are maniacally depressed for instance. The fear of landing in desperate despair, and the fear of being neglected and unfavoured, are part of what makes our lives bad, and its opposite, to feel safe, to feel that people have a minimum of care, and so forth, are contributing to a basic relief and happiness in everyone. This last argument is an argument for extensive public health care for instance: that even if you can get 1 person more healthy than another, the feeling that you are living in the risk of being a victim of the utility monster is a bad feeling, you want to feel that whatever happens, society will do its utmost to get you well, to keep you alive, and to make certain you can have a good life, that there is no bottom in which you can fall in, that you'll virtually always be caught when you fall.

Does this explanation seem tempting to you? Can you imagine how it could not be this way, and that somehow classical utilitarian theory is wrong at some core idea that can't be explained simply by incomplete knowledge of the nature of utility and the matter at hand?