Bernard Williams against "the efficient organization of happiness"

I’ve been reading a lot of Bernard Williams lately—partly for some professional reasons, partly out of sheer enjoyment and admiration for his bracing arguments. His critique of utilitarianism seems to me still underappreciated by legal scholars, but why that might be so and its importance are topics for another time. Here is a little bit from his essay “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” (from his 1973 collection Problems of the Self) discussing the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno--and with perhaps some important implications for law:

Unamuno reveals himself at equal removes from Manicheanism and from Utilitarianism; and that is correct, for the one is only the one-legged descendant of the other. That tradition – Manichean, Orphic, Platonic, Augustinian* – which contrasts the spirit and the body in such a sense that the spiritual aims at eternity, truth and salvation, while the body is adjusted to pleasure, the temporary, and eventual dissolution, is still represented, as to fifty per cent, by secular Utilitarianism: it is just one of the original pair of boots left by itself and better regarded now that the other has fallen into disrepair. Bodies are all that we have or are: hence for Utilitarianism it follows that the only focus of our arrangements can be the efficient organisation of happiness. Immortality, certainly, is out, and so life here should last as long as we determine – or eventually, one may suspect, others will determine – that it is pleasant for us to be around.

Unamuno’s outlook is at the opposite pole to this and whatever else may be wrong with it, it salutes the true idea that the meaning of life does not consist either in the management of satisfactions in a body or in an abstract immortality without one. On the one hand he had no time for Manicheanism, and admired the rather brutal Catholic faith which could express its hopes for a future life in the words which he knew on a tombstone in Bilbao:

Aunque estamos in polvo convertidos

zen Ti, Señor, nuestra esperanza fía,

que tomaremos a vivir vestidos

con la carne y la piel que nos cubria.**

Notes:

*I don’t think it's quite accurate to lump “Augustinian” into this set of views given Augustine's break (how much so is a long-running debate) from Manichaeism.

**Though we are become dust,

In thee, O Lord, our hope confides,

That we shall live again clad

In the flesh and skin that once covered us.

(Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (1921), trans. J.E. Crawford Flitch)