Tino_StylaxOoh how so?
It gets more into actual philosophy but the tl;dr (of a very complex argument that really should not be tl;rd'd) is that you cannot really say that one person, or group of people is more or less valuable then any other person, or group of people regardless of the outcome, real or perceived. In the Stalin case how would one choose what people are the ones that deserve the gain of utility over the loss of life, or if there isn't a standard to go by and its all just random, then are you really maximizing the utility gain from the actions? For all you know 90% of the people you kill might have a IQ of 150+ and bring the society to a new age in the next 10 years, if that was the case then you would actually be lowering the utility of the society and not raising it.
There are a lot of issues and holes in a utility based argument just due to all of the rabbit holes and "what if's" that you can pull from it, but I am not really sure if the class would be able to get into them in a 30 min time slot so it would really just muddle things and become really hard to have an actual discussion on anything. This also assumes that anyone even brings up the utility monster as a counterpoint.
Well, I'm an economist so for me, you can measure utility aha
I mean, if you measure it in terms of standard of living, it's pretty doable.