I think that this article correctly identifies the root issue here: naive application of utilitarianism. All of these "write better code to save the planet" blogs are an unavoidable symptom of that naivete. If you take this perspective seriously, it's clear that anything can become a moral issue. Buying an iphone, driving a car, drinking coffee, eating chicken, writing inefficient code, laughing at Dave Chapelle and so on. It's also clear that there's no genuine rationality behind this: no one really knows which actions increase or decrease utility, the people who go for this stuff are just expressing their interests and emotions under an extremely thin veneer of rationality.

While utilitarianism can be useful -- of course we should consider the outcome a policy -- I think it's a dead-end as a replacement for a bedrock moral philosophy. Utilitarians answer the question of "what is the good?" with "whatever maximizes the good". Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me.

Hannah Arendt:

> This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen—like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The "in order to" has become the content of the "for the sake of"; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.