Utilitarians Should Stop Dropping the Ball

Also, here I'll reveal the backstory behind the name Bentham's Bulldog.

Aquinas once said that true things can usually be proved in multiple ways. Ironically, this true thing is something that I can only prove in one way—a person who is an expert on Aquinas informed me of it—but the point still stands. Aquinas gave the example of the Earth being round; there are lots of different ways to prove that; flight patterns, eclipses, boats disappearing over the horizon, Foucault’s pendulums, etc. But the point is true on many topics; things that are true often entail significant things about the world, and these enable them to be multiply proved. Non-physicalism can be proved by the zombie argument, the explanatory gap, Mary’s room, and more.

Because evolution is true, there are lots of converging lines of evidence for it. Because utilitarianism is true, there are lots of good reasons to believe it. This is certainly not a universal rule—the only way to prove that I just stubbed by toe is by my testimony—but it’s true the large majority of the time. If one thinks that something is true but can never find any evidence for it, that should often give them a reason to relinquish their confidence in it.

But it seems that very often when utilitarians are defending utilitarianism in public, they totally neglect this rule. They seem to think that while utilitarianism is the true moral view and all its pronouncements are correct, this correctness is an epiphenomenal, ephemeral quality that never has any implications for the reasons we can discover for actions. When confronted with an alleged counterexample, rather than giving reasons to think that the utilitarian judgment about the case is correct, they’ll mutter something about intuitions often being wrong, rather than challenging the core judgment.

One recent frustrating example that I saw of this occurred when Peter Singer appeared on the Within Reason podcast.