I have some sympathy with that view, except that I think this is a problem for a much wider class of views than utiliarianism itself. The problem doesnât (entirely) go away if you modify utilitarianism in various attractive ways like âdonât violate rightsâ, or âyour allowed/âobligated to favour friends and family to some degreeâ or âdoing the best thing is just good, not obligatory. The underlying issue is that it seems silly to ever think you can do more good by helping insects than more normal beneficiaries, or that you can do more good in a galaxy-brained indirect way than directly, but there are reasonably strong theoretical arguments that those claims are either true, or at least could be true for all we know. That is an issue for any moral theory that says we can rank outcomes by desirability, regardless of how they think the desirability of various outcomes factors into determining what the morally correct action is. And any sane theory, in my view, thinks that how good/âbad the consequences of an action are is relevant to whether you should do it, whether or not other things are also relevant to whether the action should be performed.
Of course it is open to the non-consequentialist to say that goodness of consequences are sometimes relevant, but never with insects. But that seems a like cheating to me unless they can explain why.
In principle, or only in practice?