This is an interesting piece, but I can't shake the feeling that the author needed to work harder on his claims. There are a string of mistakes and misdirections that ultimately invalidate the piece as a whole.

> What’s the 1755 Lisbon earthquake compared with Auschwitz? What’s a flu epidemic next to Hiroshima?

The Lisbon earthquake was small compared to Auschwitz, but reaching back to 1755 is rather strange. (Portugal's total population was <3,000,000.) A better and more timely reference might be the 1931 floods in China, which did in fact kill several million people. High estimates for the death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are <300,000. The Spanish Flu, only two decades earlier, killed between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 people.

I don't think these are idle complaints about a section specifically devoted to rejecting Mill's claim that chance and nature overmatch human evil.

> When we see each other in terms of usefulness, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed long before Facebook and Twitter: ‘Hell is other people.’

This is a particular frustration of mine, because everyone misinterprets this. But a philosophy professor of all people ought to get it right. Sarte's complaint is not at all about 'seeing each other in terms of usefulness'. Rather the opposite - he acknowledges that we always use other people to shape our identities, and so specific other people can create hell for us!

Quoting Sarte himself: "'Hell is other people' has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves."

https://www.vox.com/2014/11/17/7229547/philosophy-quotes-mis...

> Even when things materially improve because of our commitment to utilitarian principles, our increased happiness often doesn’t register as meaningful.

This is perhaps the most fundamentally and damningly wrong claim in the whole piece.

Bypassing the question of pre-agricultural life, what we see is absolutely that utilitarian progress - social, economic, and technological development - has created increased happiness on a massive scale. Disease is a major source of suffering, and the oral polio vaccine prevented 1.1 million cases of paralysis in the US alone. Life satisfaction polls overwhelmingly suggest that economic and political progress make us happier. Over the last ~30 years, happiness numbers have risen worldwide (despite the US case). Richer and more equal countries are happier, and change over time suggests that causality flows that direction. Countries which perform above their wealth on happiness, like Costa Rica, are also countries which are lastingly free from armed conflict, with quality healthcare, social services, and non-corrupt government.

And all of this is people surveyed. A moment's thought on the sources of sample bias in the survey suggests that many of the least happy people surveyed are in fact those who would previously have been missed altogether - people who would have been enslaved or confined, or killed by war or disease, but who are now at least alive and accessible.

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/292865/C...

https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction

> Mill tries philosophically to resolve the paradox of suffering by arguing that higher goods such as love and literature are ultimately more satisfying than basic forms of pleasure. In some sense, that’s true. But the terms of this satisfaction are no longer utilitarian;

And in his final accounting, Samuelson offers some bizarre reversal of the no true Scotsman fallacy, rejecting as non-utilitarian any idea which he can't easily rebut. Utilitarian thought is not incapable of handling suffering which leads to greater happiness, or discussing the relative merits of different forms of happiness. Far from it - hard questions like wireheading and the repugnant conclusion are dealt with at enormous length in utilitarian thought.

Utilitarianism is simply a claim that the moral weight of actions is determined by their impact on well-being. Capabilitarianism, negative preference utilitarianism, and a dozen other developments have brought us past the initial sketches of Bentham and Mill. These complexities are well worth discussing, but they deserve better than Samuelson's blend of factual errors and vague appeals to the nobility of suffering.