Having thought about it a bit more, I realize you’re making an important equivocation here:
This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook
Ethics should not be reduced to a transactional system where only those with resources can be “good people.”
Pure first-order utilitarian systems do not have a native conception of ‘good people’. It just says, for each person, what they should do. There is no direct comparison between the goodness of different people. It can answer related questions—like if two people are stuck in a burning building, which should you save—but moral offsetting doesn’t make sense without a threshold of moral acceptability, which pure utilitarianism doesn’t have. And if you’re supplementing your utilitarianism with aspects from some other moral theory, why not supplement it with side constraints that say no murdering people?
Having thought about it a bit more, I realize you’re making an important equivocation here:
Pure first-order utilitarian systems do not have a native conception of ‘good people’. It just says, for each person, what they should do. There is no direct comparison between the goodness of different people. It can answer related questions—like if two people are stuck in a burning building, which should you save—but moral offsetting doesn’t make sense without a threshold of moral acceptability, which pure utilitarianism doesn’t have. And if you’re supplementing your utilitarianism with aspects from some other moral theory, why not supplement it with side constraints that say no murdering people?