Nice work by Brian Snyder, (linked below)! I especially like the idea of complementing utilitarian ethics with Kantian/deontological ethics, instead of just replacing one with the other. I think Marxism, in theory, in striving for better, less self-interested people, continues Monotheistic traditions of individual aspiration toward collective norms( Someone else wrote this somewhere), and both the history of theocracies and of Marxism, compared to Western neoliberal current history, demonstrate that either extreme, utilitarian or deontological, may yield worse results than a combination. But H.T. Odum’s perspective that each society is a dissipative structure, whose structure is dependent on a certain amount of energy flow, sheds light on the cost of complexity in ethics. In other words, maintaining a complex ethical system (say combining utilitarian and deontological ethics) costs some measure of the sunlight incident on a social-and-ecological system. What do you think?
https://steadystate.org/the-futility-of-utility/