Matt and Ezra are discussing pragmatic justifications for progressive taxation, aka WEALTH TRANSFER OMG. Will Wilkinson breaks things down here, and his reading seems about right to me: Matt and Ezra are gunning for maximizing well-being rather than cosmic justice. Will's probably also right about it not being a very good idea to make this argument to the public.

But this struck me as wrong, or at least unfair:

But surely Matt understands that the inability of utilitarianism to acknowledge principled constraints on the way people may use one another is the main reason why most moral philosophers believe utilitarianism to be false. Perhaps Matt thinks these philosophers confused. But if so, then they share their confusion with most Americans, who also don’t believe utility maximization is a good justification for the appropriation of their property.

Sure, hardline utilitarianism is unappealing. But I doubt that Ezra or Matt actually believe in it. Rule utilitarianism works just fine, and lets us simultaneously accommodate the public's intuition that A) they should be able to go under anesthesia without having their organs harvested and B) there's a fuzzily-defined and slight but real inverse relationship between wealth and property rights — i.e. it's okay to take a few extra hot sauce packets from Taco Bell for later use. And isn't accordance with intuition what the validity of a philosophical system is all about?

Of course, this standpoint is still pretty paternalistic. To which I can only respond: meh.