Utilitarianism Analysis

Utilitarianism, we have concluded, is unlikely to generate a psychologically realistic set of motivations. To see this remember that at the individual level additive separability tends to foster an abstract relation to our future selves. In a similar fashion, in an inter-generational optimization problem we tend to see other people as abstract individuals, as strangers, and it is hard to explain why we should have an interest in their well-being or advantage. Our relation to our own future selves, then, is as problematic as it is to the lives of those in the future-as thinkers such as Hazlitt (2009) and Sidgwick (Gray, 2011) clearly understood. Moreover, utilitarianism can, it is argued, weaken the sense of continuity in another way. Since

I can, it is argued, harm or benefit them but they cannot have a similar impact on me. Also, the strength of my concern for them is limited because my relation to them is sustained only by the imagination or successively weakening degrees of altruism or by abstract reasoning. ‘The other’ is an abstraction and not the same as a ‘thou,’ or my neighbor. In addition, given that their existence, number, identity and values may be unknown or unrecognizable, is concern about the interests of future generations even

Under this view-which is inextricably linked with both cyclical time and a richer understanding of oikenomics-we have a greater degree of obligation to the maintenance, sustenance, nurturing and care of both other people as well as the environment. In contrast, the idea of limitless growth and the linear progression of time has gone hand-in-hand with an emphasis on a non-relational view of the individual and with scarcity. In linear time we count our losses and the remembrance of things past rises to the surface-if at all-by sheer coincidence.
In a similar vein to Baier, Scheffler (2013) maintains that at least part of what goes in to making us ‘valuing creatures’ is the sense of objects, ways of life and individual lives continuing over time. The deep-rooted need for temporal extension may manifest itself in the high regard we give to remembrance, rituals and repetition on the one hand, and the importance of future-directed attitudes (intentions, expectations) and words on the other. A life without these features may “come to seem fractured and disjointed” (Scheffler,