A GREATEST TOO FAR.

Utilitarian thinking is empty, and there's nothing like a rigorous price-theoretic argument to show it.

What is nonsensical about the proposition, “A good economic system maximizes the welfare of the maximum number of people”?

Only one quantity can be maximized subject to all others being held at specified levels. You can maximize the welfare of one person provided that the welfare of each of the other people is unchanged.

I'll let Rawlsians struggle with what happens if you treat the welfare of the least-favored person as the constraint.

The moment we admit into consideration the welfare of a second person who potentially interacts, directly or indirectly, with the first person, the literal maximization of the first person’s welfare is no longer ethically desirable. If maximizing the first person’s welfare were truly the goal, then the second person must disregard his or her own welfare and act exclusively as a means of assisting the first person to achieve maximum welfare. The second person, in effect, would be the first person’s slave.

Once the welfare of the second person is admitted to be desirable, we encounter the necessity of making trade-offs. Although very often cooperation of person one with person two enables both persons to increase their welfare, neither person gets all the gains from the cooperation. The gains are shared.

It might be fun to come out of retirement, if only for a while, to pose on a survey of public policy examination a question reading something like, "Last year, the Centers for Disease Control chose to permit 81,000 deaths by drug overdose, 50,000 suicides, half a  million cases of domestic battery, and three million episodes of severe depression ..." in the service of maximizing the risk reduction from Wuhan coronavirus.