John Rawls' A Theory of Justice stated that "utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons". Utilitarianism takes seriously the distinction between persons to the extent that utility is felt by each person distinctly. But why should anyone take seriously ethics that makes persons worse off than utilitarianism would? John Rawls and other individualists have such ethics. A person is a construction of the body producing it. Utilitarianism acknowledges that construction and takes it into account in maximizing persons' utilities. But that construction is not sacrosanct to me like it is to extreme individualists. A constraint that each person's utility may never be sacrificed makes persons worse off and therefore I reject that constraint.
Anyway, I reject completely sacrificing persons due to the whims of a lynch mob. I am not a classical Benthamite utilitarian. I refuse to accommodate the desire to harm another person. Instead, I want to maximize the utility to improve one's life. This is similar to John Stuart Mill's classification of different utilities. Most humans want to harm other people when the other people act in a way that is perceived antisocial. States are the worst form of conformism. But I accept self-defense and punishment.
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