Sandel Against the Utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham
Michael Sandel has built a significant body of work on critiquing the foundations of modern liberalism and market fundamentalism. Central to his critique is a sustained philosophical challenge to utilitarianism, the ethical framework developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which defines justice and morality solely by the maximization of overall happiness or "utility." He argues that this approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of justice and the value of human dignity. For Sandel, utilitarianism is not merely a flawed ethical theory; it is a moral framework that reduces rich human values to a cold calculus, treats individuals as expendable means to an aggregate end, and underpins a technocratic, market-driven society that erodes authentic civic life and shared moral deliberation.
Utilitarianism reduces morality to calculation
Michael Sandel argues that utilitarianism—especially as articulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill—collapses all moral reasoning into a single measure: maximizing happiness or utility. He sees this as a flattening of moral life, since it ignores the qualitative differences among kinds of pleasures, goods, and values. To ask what produces the greatest happiness is to miss what really matters: the right, the just, the good in themselves. For Sandel, utilitarianism’s quantitative calculus turns morality into a kind of market reasoning—weighing costs and benefits rather than asking what is worthy, fair, or just.
It treats individuals as means rather than ends
A core Kantian influence runs through Sandel’s critique: Utilitarianism, he says, sacrifices the individual for the sake of aggregate welfare. If killing or exploiting one person increases total happiness, utilitarianism has no principled objection. Sandel sees this as a violation of human dignity and moral autonomy. It allows for injustices like slavery, torture, or discrimination—so long as the total happiness balance sheet looks positive. The utilitarian calculus fails to respect the separateness of persons. This line echoes John Rawls, whom Sandel studied and later debated—but Sandel agrees with Rawls here that utilitarianism erases the moral boundary between persons by summing up their experiences as if society were one big organism.
It confuses the good with the right
For Sandel, the “right” (moral principles and justice) should not be determined solely by the “good” (happiness, welfare, or preference satisfaction). Utilitarianism reverses this: it defines rightness by whatever maximizes good consequences. Sandel argues that this leads to moral relativism disguised as moral certainty—since there is no intrinsic right or wrong, only more or less utility.
It encourages a technocratic and market-oriented politics
In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel extends this critique beyond ethics into politics and economics. He sees utilitarian logic as the moral foundation of neoliberalism—where policy decisions are justified by cost-benefit analyses rather than by public deliberation about values and purposes. “We drift from having a market economy to being a market society.” Utilitarianism, in his view, underwrites that drift because it measures all values on a single scale (utility, efficiency, willingness to pay), thereby eroding civic virtue and moral judgment.
Sandel’s alternative: justice as moral and civic reasoning
Against utilitarianism, Sandel advocates for public reasoning about the good life—a revival of Aristotelian and communitarian ethics. He argues that questions of justice cannot be settled by aggregate preference or neutrality; they require debate about what we owe to one another and what kind of society we want to be.
Overall Positioning
Sandel often positions his arguments against the deontological (duty-based) liberalism of thinkers like John Rawls and Immanuel Kant, who prioritize the "right" (principles of justice) over the "good" (conceptions of a virtuous life). He advocates for a return to a more Aristotelian, more Hegelian or teleological approach, arguing that justice and rights must be linked to moral desert and the purpose (telos) of social practice. He does not seek to abandon the concept of justice, but rather to ground it in a richer, more communal understanding of human life and moral deliberation than he believes modern liberalism can provide. He critiques the liberal conception of the individual as an "unencumbered self," meaning a self whose identity is independent of its community, history, or moral commitments. He argues that this abstract view fails to account for the crucial role that shared values, communal ties, and collective identity play in moral reasoning and a just society. He challenges the liberal ideal that the state should remain strictly neutral on questions of the "good life" (i.e., how people should live and what constitutes a valuable life). Sandel contends that true justice is not neutral and requires public deliberation about shared moral and civic virtues.
LLM
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes — that’s a very apt metaphor, and it captures something quite deep about the moral–philosophical landscape that Sandel and others are navigating. Let’s unpack it carefully.
1. The metaphor
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Kantianism as the brake pedal: it restrains, sets limits, and introduces moral form. It says, “You may not cross this line, no matter how much good might come of it.”
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Utilitarianism as the accelerator: it propels, optimizes, and drives action toward greater outcomes. It says, “Push forward as long as total welfare increases.”
That contrast maps onto two very different moral energies — constraint versus expansion, respect versus optimization, deontic boundaries versus teleological horizons.
2. The philosophical mechanics
| Function | Neo-Kantian/Deontological | Utilitarian/Consequentialist |
|---|---|---|
| Principle | Duty, autonomy, moral law | Utility, welfare, preference satisfaction |
| Logic | Categorical (“never treat persons merely as means”) | Hypothetical (“if it increases happiness, do it”) |
| Ethical motion | Restrictive and normative | Expansive and instrumental |
| Temporal attitude | Oriented to permanence, universality | Oriented to progress, outcome, futurity |
Kantian frameworks set moral speed limits: they preserve the dignity of persons and maintain that certain things must not be done, regardless of consequences. Utilitarianism steps on the gas: it seeks continuous improvement, optimization, and efficiency — more happiness, more satisfaction, more output.
3. Historical and political resonance
You can see this dialectic historically:
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The Enlightenment and early liberalism introduced Kantian brakes: reason, rights, and the moral autonomy of persons.
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Industrial capitalism and later neoliberalism pressed the utilitarian accelerator: measure, optimize, and maximize utility, often in economic form (productivity, GDP, efficiency).
The modern West has oscillated between these poles: the moral law as a constraint on power versus the promise of perpetual improvement through calculative reason.
4. Sandel’s use of this tension
Sandel sees our present condition as over-accelerated — the utilitarian logic has run ahead, colonizing every domain with cost-benefit reasoning. The civic brakes have worn thin. His project, in a sense, is to restore the friction — to remind us that not everything can be justified by outcome or utility, and that moral deliberation must sometimes slow down or even refuse motion altogether.
“The problem is not that we have too much morality in politics, but too little moral argument.”
In Sandel’s frame, utilitarianism produces motion without reflection..
5. A deeper dynamic: motion vs. mediation
On an existential level, your metaphor points to a more general modern pathology:
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Utilitarianism represents the drive toward immediacy, efficiency, and total mediation of life by calculation.
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Kantian ethics reasserts the necessity of mediation — that not all ends can be subsumed under a single measure, and that some things must remain inviolable, resistant to optimization.
So yes, utilitarianism accelerates the world toward total mobilization, while the Kantian orientation tries to brake that momentum — to maintain spaces of moral resistance where the logic of efficiency cannot dominate.
6. A synthesis
Neither alone suffices:
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Pure Kantianism can paralyze action, leading to moral rigidity and abstraction.
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Pure utilitarianism can devour everything, leading to moral blindness and technocracy.
The political and ethical challenge is how to balance propulsion with restraint, motion with form, efficiency with meaning.
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