Since it was first formalized in the mid-1800s, Utilitarianism has dominated discussions of human behavior in philosophical ethics and in economics. In particular, it acts as the foundation of “rationality” that defines Homo economicus, the idealized human being in economics which forms the benchmark against which actual human behaviors are compared, because it is (purported to be) the only ethical framework which is “rational”. Specifically, Utilitarianism is “VNM-rational”, which means that it’s the best possible system that satisfies the axioms of rational behavior defined by the Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem.
In this article, I purport to demonstrate that Utilitarianism does not actually make sense in relation to human values and is not actually a description of rational behavior, and I formally propose an alternative consequentialist theory that escapes the VNM theorem’s erroneous axioms.