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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

The end justifies the means?

This is - of course - a very rough synopsis of Machiavelli's treatise - even if he never actually said that.

But the other way of looking at his work was that he was the first person to develop a code of ethics that led to the idea of "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people"

I highly recommend the series from the blog of the this Renaicance scholar and specialist in Machiavelli which I discovered via HN the other day: https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/

He argues quite compellingly that Machiavelli's work led to classical utilitarianism ethics ("the greatest good to the greatest number of people") since he was the first to consider judging actions on their consequences rather than "what was in someone's heart".

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> "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people"

Determining this, even with the information available today, seems like folly; like a never ending circle of statistical manipulations and justifications to support preconceived notions.

Action on just about any social issue of note can be argued one way or another to be satisfying this guideline.

I recall a rather amazing paper a while back arguing that markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P=NP. There are too many brutal NP-hard optimizations involved. I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. If these things were possible we would live in a utopia.

> I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning.

It would be worse for central planning, because in addition to the problem you mention, central planning has the problem of getting the necessary information to the central planner, which in the general case is impossible: the information goes up as the exponential of the population size, but the bandwidth of information channels to the central planner only goes up linearly with the population size.

Markets are no better on any of these issues.

They are at least in the sense that instead of a small group of individuals attempting to process all the information (impossible), you have a large number of individuals processing subsets of the information (possible, but can have it's own issues like missing the forest for the threes).

It's true that you could use twisted logic to change the outcome of what the greatest good is, but they don't stand up to reasoning. Anyone can say anything to defend their position. Many have just said "It's God's will".

Does that mean you can't actually know what the greatest good is? We can probably get very close to knowing it, and the little details shouldn't matter. But most of our "social issues" are squabbles over these details, and the good never gets done, or becomes reduced.

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