To those who think disagreeing with all traditional Moral values (individual or universal) is going to make them look cool and hip ... to those who feel they constantly (and often blindly) need to to insist on standing for the DARKer side of moral judgments and discussions, like annoying teenage goths, with no well thought justifications for their stance ... and who mistakingly believe that Utilitarianism stands there with them ...
You people all dismiss Altruism without thinking twice about it ... (granted that I stand there with you on this one, but that's besides the point) ... next time you want to talk about Utilitarianism (at least Mill's version of it and not Bentham's) just because you have heard many people in our time disagree with it ... and given your way of thinking it should be COOL and Dark enough ... think again ...
Here is a piece of bitter reading for you to chew on ...
"... as between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. "To do as you would be done by," and "to love your neighbor as yourself," constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness or (as, speaking practically, it maybe called) the interest of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with interest of the whole; and, secondly, that education and opinion which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole, especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being's sentient existence".
"Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man".
Both from Utilitarianism Chapter 2
So next time you want to get on someone's nerve by acting all dark and immoral and MODERN and cool ... know this ... the system of calculating Utility to make moral decisions fits your (or even mine) individualistic and goth-like character insofar as you are talking about individual decision making. Utilitarianism was NOT meant by these great philosophers (Mill, Bentham, Sidgwick) to be used for solving personal dilemmas ... it is meant to be a social, economic, and political system ... and used in that way, it is not going to be as selfish individual-friendly as you might think ... in Utilitarianism the entire society is treated as ONE ... you, and your little individuality counts only as a unit ... get it? ... you are in the calculations, but only as a unit! ... and PLEASEEEEEE ... refrain from getting on my nerves with your failure to get your facts straight! ... thanks.