So there's this argument that utilitarianism doesn't work because (per work by behavioral economists) preferences are non-transitive. That is, you can't make a top to bottom list of preferences for each person where the higher position is always a higher preference.

But, like, surely preferences are *pretty* transitive? You can construct weird non-transitive cases. But for most purchase you could construct a list.

@ZachWeinersmith

I'm not convinced. There are people (NOT TO GET POLITICAL ABOUT IT) for whom conformity and uniformity are strong societal preferences, to the extent that they will vote against their own economic interests for people who promise to enforce them, and others (yeah, hi) for whom they are problems we as a civilization are attempting to solve.