Examples Of Monetized Utilitarianism

How is the lottery an example of the utilitarian monster?

Answer: the article mentions that the lottery is controlled by the State, meaning that a few people in charge makes a lot of money out of millions of people, and because gambling is a somewhat a form of "entertainment" and one individual might win and get a lot money (pleasure) from it, it supposedly outweighs the harm of these other million of individuals that gave their money away and lost. Nevertheless, in utilitarian monster logic, an experiment create by Robert Nozick, the intensified pleasure of one individual is more important than the small harm caused to others. The comic picture below by Peter Singer, paints a more vivid image of what the utilitarian monsters looks like:

Don't worry, I did the math. The amount of pleasure I got from writing this terrible joke outweighs the suffering it caused from people having to read it.

Figure 1: Comic example of Utilitarian monster by Philosopher Peter Singer in ExistentialComics.com

How can you set yourself up to argue in favor of or against the ethical existence of the lottery in terms of monetized utilitarianism?

Answer: Our readings describes "Monetized utilitarianism as the attempt to measure happiness, to the extent possible, in terms of money" (Brusseau, 2012).

I would argue against lottery, one because I really do not understand the pleasure of gambling at all, but most because it seems to me, that out of millions of people, only one or a couple few might really get happy and although monetized utilitarianism measures pleasure in terms of money, there will be a lot of unhappy and disappointed individuals out of their money or at least have lost all the money they put into it, not to say that as the Telegraph describes, "the chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot is 1 in 13,983,816 (or approximately 1 in 14 million)" (the Telegraph, 2017), meaning that there is a lot people not benefiting from monetized

utilitarianism.

Lotteries are about money and about fun—that is, even for the losers, there’s a benefit in the thrill of watching the numbers turn up. Could the case be made that, from a hedonistic utilitarian standpoint, the lottery is ethically recommendable because it serves the welfare not only of the winner but also of the millions of losers?

Answer: Hedonistic utilitarianism "seeks to maximize any and all sensations of happiness and pleasure" (Brusseau, 2012), meaning that it only fits for the winner, although the other players might experience the pleasure and thrill of playing, once they lose that pleasure will not be maximized, instead will produce feelings of loss, disappointment and maybe even anger toward the winner, which by all means will be totally experiencing the benefits of hedonistic utilitarianism.

One of Lindsay Beyerstein’s concerns is that the lottery tends to redistribute money from the poor toward the rich. Does a utilitarian necessarily consider this redistribution unethical?
Answer: I believe that an utilitarian does not think that the lottery is unethical, because as Brusseau describes "the outcome matters, not the act". Therefore for utilitarians, the outcome of a possible individual reaching greatest happiness justify the idea of playing the lottery. Nevertheless there might be a utilitarian contradiction here, if we put the number of people that will be happier in one column against the millions that will lose on the other column, it will not add up positively, there will probably be a greater number of unhappy people on loser column, meaning that the greater sum of unhappiness would indicate an unethical decision.