1. Utility

The future of the economy is the future of the utility of objects. Utilitarian thinkers sought to construct a formal distribution channel of uses, curtailing the systems of cultural rules and historical progress.

Utilitarianism was a minority position in nineteenth-century English philosophy. After many twists and turns, it gradually spread across all branches of modern knowledge: economics, animal ethics, morality, political science, and law. This ‘consequentialist’ moral theory focuses on an action’s consequences, and not on an action’s intention or intrinsic value. The theory recommends acting so that every being’s well-being increases. It is not egoistic (since it does not concern the value of my own well-being), but concerns the calculation of the values of human actions. Utilitarianism desubstantialises both actions and things in their relation to the sentient and moral beings that we are, and opens up an evental and objective network. The value of events and objects depends on the way in which they contextually affect surrounding events and objects; their value does not depend on some kind of essence or value intrinsic to things or beings.

This utilitarian world of exchangeable and calculable things and events may appear to be the flat and formal world of Book I. In fact, as we will demonstrate, this utilitarian world is merely an economic approximation of our flat and formal world. The utilitarian world curtails history’s objective accumulation. Contrasting this world with a moral, sociological, or anthropological state of exception is an empty gesture. Instead, one must play it at its own game, by determining how its desubstantialisation of used and exchanged things always remains incomplete.

Jeremy Bentham's hedonist utilitarianism is a moral economy that consists in maximising the well-being of the greatest number of persons. It is a system of value equivalence that operates through the compensation and optimisation of all potential losses with higher gains.