On cost-benefit calculations involving more than one person

The trouble with cost-benefit calculations of any kind that involve more than one person is that the person or persons who reap the benefits are not necessarily the same as the persons who bear the costs.

The writer Borges says somewhere that it makes no sense to speak of the total amount of suffering in the world because pain is not calculable. In much the same manner, one can argue that it makes no sense to speak of the cost to society 'as a whole' or the benefit to society 'as a whole' because suffering or benefits do not compute that way. The concept of the total happiness of a society is a similarly silly one.

But, in any case, it is profoundly contradictory for liberals and neoliberals to make cost-benefit arguments about society as a whole, given that they believe in individual self-interest as the fundamental unit of economics, society, politics, etc. If an individual is interested in maximizing his or her self-interest, then he or she will not care, as a rule, about the impact of each of his or her actions on society as a whole. And neoliberals or liberals, by definition, need to defend this position.

Unless one argues that individual self-interest lies in the interest of society as a whole.

But isn't that a socialist argument: the kind of argument to which neoliberals declare themselves unconditionally opposed?