Critics of utilitarianism are very fond of comparing libertarianism to utilitarianism. They claim that utilitarianism involves trotting out a plausible sounding moral principle, but then just biting the bullet on all of its crazy results. Instead, we should take its litany of crazy results to be a really good reason to reject it.
There are radical libertarians who think that one should never violate rights, whatever the benefits. Thus, these people would be opposed to stealing one penny from Jeff Bezos to prevent infinite torture. This view is just crazy!
When these people cobble together justifications for their deranged views, it’s important to keep in mind that, even if the principles sound intuitive—being about owning oneself and so on—once they start to have crazy implications, they no longer sound plausible at all. My acceptance of the libertarian moral axioms comes with a ceteris paribus clause—if it requires me sanctioning infinite torture instead of stealing a penny, then I have decisive reason to reject the premises.
Something very similar is true of natural law theory. Natural law theory may sound plausible at first, but when it entails the wrongness of contraception, homosexuality, every lying, and that animals don’t matter, it no longer seems plausible at all.
However, utilitarianism is not like these. When a radical libertarian bites the bullet, there’s nothing more they can say. The same is true of the natural law theorists. Their only defense is that it falls out of the theory, and the theory seems correct.
However, when a utilitarian bites the bullet, there’s a lot they can say—other than just that it follows from the theory. As I’ve argued at great length throughout the utilitarianism wins outright series, the controversial conclusions of utilitarianism—from the repugnant conclusion, to the utility monster, to the organ harvesting case—all end up being impossible to deny, upon reflection. This is exactly what we’d expect of the correct moral theory: it may diverge from our intuitions somewhat, but when it does, we’d expect careful reflection to bring our intuitions more in line with it.
A counterexample only counts as a counterexample if we continue to find it unintuitive upon reflection. However, with the utilitarian counterexamples, there are always counterarguments against them as counterexamples.
Noam Chomsky says a lot of controversial things. I don’t, in this article, intend to take a broad stance on how correct Chomsky is. However, in the case of Chomsky, rather than point out merely that he says unintuitive things, to argue that his theories are broadly wrong, one would have to analyze the unintuitive things that he says, and see if they turn out to be correct. The same should be done with utilitarianism.
However, let’s consider some far less sophisticated leftists than Chomsky—ones whose sole argument for radical anti-capitalist views is that Marx said that capitalism is bad; in other words, it follows from the theory. If there was no robust defense of the controversial claims that were made, that would count strongly against their theories.
Utilitarianism is more like Chomsky and less like random foolish leftists. When it makes a controversial claim—like that you should harvest organs—it brings the receipts.
Thus, my disagreement with those who claim that utilitarianism is like libertarianism is factual, not methodological. I agree that a very good tip off that your theory is wrong is that it keeps turning up crazy results. If your theories starting premises are less plausible than the counterexample to the theory, then we have decisive reason to reject your theory.
Thus, one good way to see that you’re going wrong in theorizing is if you keep having to say “look—I know this sounds wrong, but it’s what the theory says.” If instead, what you find yourself saying is, “look—I know this sounds wrong, but here are a dozen crazy things that follow from rejecting it,” you should be in the clear. All the better for utilitarians.