Jeremy Bentham and world destruction

In the 1970s, there was a dangerous design fault in a model of one of the famous American automobile brands, where the fuel tank at the bottom rear of the vehicles used to explode on impact from behind during accidents, leading to considerable deaths and serious injuries. Guess what the manufacturing company did?!

The company used the classical American mentality that fully adopts the philosophy of the famous British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, who died in 1832. It denies the existence of values and argues that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong”, which means that ‘right’ is what is beneficial and wrong is what causes pain and loss.

Accordingly, the company analyzed its possible gains and losses, which is the basis of Bentham’s utilitarianism philosophy, and found that redesigning the fuel tanks to prevent the problem would cost $11 per vehicle, and by calculating the number of faulty vehicles - there were 12 million of them would make the total cost $132 million. They also found that if they ignored the fault and compensated each of the 180 fatalities with $200,000 and each of the 180 injured with $67,000 and paid $700 to fix 2,000 faulty vehicles, the total cost would only be $49 million. Thus, the company decided to ignore the fault and opted for the least cost.

This utilitarianism is a real disgusting fact of people with the least and faintest conscience, yet is forms the basis of American and European policies and they boast about graduating the best utilitarian minds in the world that are able to assess gains and losses. The same principle applies to the Phillip Morris tobacco company that deals with the entire world with the same utilitarian mentality of calculating gains and losses and prices the life of individuals by dollars they would make.

The very same pragmatics is used in politics and greedy economies. Thus, what is going on in Syria is no wonder and nobody pays attention to killing thousands and displacing millions there despite the presence of the UN and international courts and agreements, simply because decision-makers have assessed the gains and losses and believe that things are better and more profitable this way.

Notably, those doing such assessments and calculations are known as ‘experts’ and are paid handsomely for ‘pricing’ peoples’ lives and thus saving millions for tycoons and businessmen and achieving diplomatic gains for politicians. This is how things are going on in this ugly world because of Bentham’s utilitarianism that turned the world into a dead, heartless one!