Contra Huemer on utilitarianism part 10 Conclusions

Non consequentialist cookie distributions delenda est

Looking through Huemer’s objections to utilitarianism all of the alleged counterexamples seemed intuitively shallow. They only appeared reasonable prior to careful reflection. However, upon careful reflection, they are revealed to be false.

Huemer writes “c.    Maybe there are specific problems with each of the above intuitions.

This is the only approach that I would accept as a reasonable defense of utilitarianism. I.e., you look at each of the cases from section 1, and in each case you show a way in which that intuition leads to some sort of incoherence or paradox (see, e.g., https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEAPF.pdf), or you find specific evidence that the intuition is caused by some factor that we independently take to be unreliable at producing true beliefs (where this factor doesn’t cause standard utilitarian intuitions), or you can argue that these intuitions are produced by some feature of the cases that everyone agrees is morally irrelevant.

So that leaves some room open for a rational utilitarianism, but this would require a lot more work, so we don’t have time to investigate that approach here. But until someone successfully carries out that rather large project, we should default to deontology.”

I have undertaken that project, and I think the defenses of most of the cases were pretty decisive. Thanks for reading everyone.