This argument seems a little surreal. Is the take here seriously "utilitarianism is so intrinsically bad that wealth is evil because it causes utilitarianism?"
Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others.
I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people".
(That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled.
- "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign.
- "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right.
- PNAS is a bad sign.
- 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work.
- Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best.
- Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad.
My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)