Source: EconLog
by Pierre Lemieux
“John Stuart Mill famously wrote, about pushing principles to the extreme, that ‘unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case’ (On Liberty). This is not obvious, for extremes often produce antinomic or non-generalizable results. One may perhaps affirm that stealing $25 from Elon Musk without anybody knowing (I suspect that Musk rounds up his accounting figures to the nearest thousand) and giving it to a very poor family for a meal at McDonald’s would increase the latter’s utility more than it would decrease the former’s. But in less extreme cases, it becomes obvious (or so I argue with many if not most economists) that any concept of ‘aggregate utility’ is meaningless because interpersonal comparisons of utility are scientifically impossible.” (05/20/25)