Someone, somewhere, is running the numbers.
They’re weighing costs against benefits, acceptable losses against projected gains, friction against efficiency. They’re deciding what “better” looks like – and more importantly, they’re deciding who gets to count.
This is utilitarianism in practice. Not the philosophy seminar version, but the real one. The one that shapes policy, designs systems, builds products, writes laws. The greatest good for the greatest number. Clean. Logical. Allegedly objective.
Except the math is never objective. The math is only as neutral as the person holding the calculator.
Margaret Atwood wrote: “Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some.”
She was writing about Gilead. A fictional theocracy where reproductive rights were stripped in the name of societal survival. A cautionary tale.
But cautionary tales have a habit of not staying fictional.
Think about every system ever designed to make something more efficient. Every policy written to maximize benefit. Every product built to serve “most users.” Every algorithm optimizing for engagement, or safety, or productivity, or justice. At the center of every single one is a decision – usually made quietly, often made by a very small group of people – about what counts as “better.”
Better than what? Better for whom? Better according to which values, which priorities, which version of the future someone decided to aim for?
The calculator doesn’t answer those questions. The calculator just runs the numbers you give it. And I think we’ve started mistaking optimization for objectivity.
This is the part we don’t talk about enough. We argue about the outputs – the policy is unfair, the system has bias, the product excludes people – and those arguments matter. But they’re downstream of the real question: who decided what to optimize for in the first place? Who was in the room? Whose experience shaped the variables? Whose “worse” got rounded down because it wasn’t legible to the person holding the calculator?
I keep coming back to this across domains I care about. The specific subject almost doesn’t matter. The pattern is the same. Someone makes a utilitarian argument for a decision that concentrates benefit in one group and distributes cost to another. The math looks clean. The trade-off looks reasonable. And the people on the losing end are left explaining, again, that they were never in the math to begin with.
Here’s what I don’t have: a clean answer to any of this. I don’t have a better framework for decision-making, a policy proposal, or a rubric for who should be in the room. I’m genuinely not even sure those are the right questions yet.
What I do think – the one thing I’m willing to say out loud – is this:
The person holding the calculator needs to change.
Not the math. Not necessarily the methodology. The person. Or more accurately, the composition of people. The ones who decide what counts as a variable and what gets left off the spreadsheet entirely. The ones whose lived experience – and whose skin in the game – shapes what “better” is even allowed to mean.
Better never means better for everyone.
Which means someone is always paying a cost. The question is whether the people who pay it had any say in the calculation.