I’m not sure the criticism of utilitarianism failing on its own grounds is very common. My understanding is that when people point to harms that someone following utilitarianism would cause, their claim is that this is entirely consistent with utilitarianism, and that that’s the problem with utilitarianism. They object to the harms themselves (because they violate non-consequentialist duties).
Of course a plausible response is often that non-naive utilitarianism would not endorse such harms. Because they are not actually outweighed by the benefits when taking a full accounting of the consequences. i.e. The utilitarian thing to do is often not “try to do the utilitarian calculation based on a faulty world-model and take the ‘optimal’ action.” But we knew this without looking at the historical track record.
Thanks! I don’t have a great sense of how common the criticism I mentioned is, so maybe “common” was too strong. It does seem to be at least prominent enough to get discussed in the SEP article on consequentialism:
Furthermore, a utilitarian criterion of right implies that it would not be morally right to use the principle of utility as a decision procedure in cases where it would not maximize utility to try to calculate utilities before acting. [...] This move is supposed to make consequentialism self-refuting, according to some opponents.
But you’re probably right that some of the people who point to historical track records have non-consequentialist arguments in mind.
I’m not sure the criticism of utilitarianism failing on its own grounds is very common. My understanding is that when people point to harms that someone following utilitarianism would cause, their claim is that this is entirely consistent with utilitarianism, and that that’s the problem with utilitarianism. They object to the harms themselves (because they violate non-consequentialist duties).
Of course a plausible response is often that non-naive utilitarianism would not endorse such harms. Because they are not actually outweighed by the benefits when taking a full accounting of the consequences. i.e. The utilitarian thing to do is often not “try to do the utilitarian calculation based on a faulty world-model and take the ‘optimal’ action.” But we knew this without looking at the historical track record.
Thanks! I don’t have a great sense of how common the criticism I mentioned is, so maybe “common” was too strong. It does seem to be at least prominent enough to get discussed in the SEP article on consequentialism:
But you’re probably right that some of the people who point to historical track records have non-consequentialist arguments in mind.