Setting the Stage 57 

Let me first clarify why and how some arguments fall beyond the scope of this chapter. To begin with, some objections against utilitarianism are not action

guidance objections, even if they draw upon considerations similar to those

that I presented in the previous chapter. In what follows, I will assume that to be an action guidance objection to utilitarianism, an argument must include

either a premise according to which utilitarianism is not action guiding in

some way, or a premise that is crucially supported by such a claim. Otherwise, the argument is not ultimately concerned with action guidance. Some objec- tions discussed in the literature fail to satisfy this condition, although they are ostensibly about action guidance. For example, in the following passage James Lenman argues that if utilitarianism is true, then we do not know that the “crimes of Hitler were wrong”:

We have only the feeblest of grounds, from an objective consequentialist per- spective, to suppose that the crimes of Hitler were wrong. Here, if anywhere, surely, there is a considered moral judgment at stake that is well-enough en- trenched not to be up for grabs in the cut and thrust of reflective equilibrium, a judgment far enough from the periphery of the web of our moral beliefs to furnish a compelling reductio of any theory that might undermine it.52

Lenman’s idea is that if utilitarianism is true, then we are not justified in be- lieving that Hitler’s (criminal) acts are wrong; but, the argument goes, we are justified in believing that these acts are wrong, and so we can conclude that utilitarianism is false.

A first problem with Lenman’s argument is that it concerns wrongness. Even if utilitarianism is true, we are still justified in believing that Hitler’s (criminal) acts are wrong, because almost every act is wrong according to util- itarianism – i.e., only the few optimal acts are right according to the theory. So we have more than “the feeblest of grounds” to believe that Hitler’s acts are wrong according to utilitarianism. As a result, Lenman’s argument would be more convincing if it was stated in terms of rightness. For example, he could argue that we are justified in believing that one of Mother Teresa’s char- itable acts is right, but that utilitarianism (implausibly) rules such justification out. Alternatively, to adhere more closely to the spirit of his objection, Len- man could state his case in terms of knowledge: he could claim that if utilitar- ianism is true, then we do not know that Hitler’s (criminal) acts are wrong – that much seems correct.

Suppose that we qualify Lenman’s argument in the latter way. Even so, it is still not ultimately concerned with action guidance. To see this, suppose that we extend our definition of doxastic guidance to cover wrongness, and that whenever we think about which act is wrong according to utilitarianism, we will on this basis come to know that one of Hitler’s criminal acts is wrong according to the theory. In such a case, the truth of utilitarianism will still undermine our actual claim to knowing that Hitler’s act is wrong. This is, first, because most of us do not have our knowledge about the wrongness of Hitler’s acts on the basis of thinking about what utilitarianism says; and, second, be- cause it is implausible that we would, if utilitarianism is true, have this knowledge by other means, such as by direct moral intuition. The latter would (implausibly) require our intuitions to be sensitive to unknown empirical facts about pleasure and pain situated in the far future. So even if utilitarianism is doxastically guiding with respect to wrongness, utilitarianism will still imply that we do not know that Hitler’s criminal acts are wrong. Similarly, even if a map is helpful for letting you learn where I live, the map is irrelevant for your

actual knowledge of where I live before you have consulted it. In the light of

the above considerations, we should conclude that Lenman’s objection is not ultimately concerned with action guidance, but rather with how utilitarianism is incompatible with what we consider to be our actual moral epistemic situa- tion. For this reason, rather than considering Lenman’s original argument, I will discuss a closely related objection in section 3.6 that properly counts as an action guidance objection. This is the objection that utilitarianism, because it is not action guiding, is incompatible with our ability to gain moral knowledge, rather than with us having moral knowledge.

Some objections count properly as action guidance objections, but are still not sufficiently independent of other arguments against utilitarianism to merit

consideration. For example, Lenman has also argued that our ignorance about the future makes the integrity objection to utilitarianism more pressing; this is the objection that utilitarianism conflicts with how we intuitively are morally permitted to live our lives according to our own ideals and values.53 _{Even if}

Lenman is right, this specific problem relies intimately on the success of the integrity objection; if that objection succeeds, then utilitarianism is done for, and if it fails, then Lenman’s objection fails as well. In this text, I focus instead on action guidance objections whose success are not so obviously held hostage to the success of other objections to utilitarianism. In other words, I try to answer this question: Does the fact that utilitarianism is not doxastically guid- ing for us give us further reason to reject the theory, apart from that already provided by other objections?

Another group of objections which is missing from my discussion is that of distinctively meta-ethical action guidance objections. For example, perhaps we could argue against utilitarianism by demonstrating that morality is a “hu- man construct” or that it is “determined by humans,” and then show how these meta-ethical facts justifies the demand that moral theories should be action guiding.54 _{While I will not investigate such arguments in this book, I wish to}

point out that it is not trivial to make them work – even if we can make the ideas that morality is a “human construct” and is “determined by humans” clear and coherent. For example, intuitively, the idea that morality is “made by humans” seems at most to support that the true moral theory is practically

relevant to decision making – and for this purpose it is enough that a moral

theory is evidentially guiding, which utilitarianism is. We could also argue against utilitarianism by embracing some non-cognitivist meta-ethical theory, according to which moral statements are not even truth-apt – that is, they are neither true nor false. Perhaps such a view can justify a demand that moral theories should be action guiding – for example, it does not seem far-fetched to think that if moral statements are imperatives, then it is the function of moral statements to be action guiding (since it is, we could argue, the function of imperatives in general to “prompt action”), and perhaps we can find a argu- mentative path from that claim to an objection to utilitarianism. Even so, we might wonder what it even means to “object” to a moral theory on non-cogni- tive meta-ethical views. In particular, we might wonder whether utilitarianism is even a proposition on such views, one that can have properties such as being bad, being false, and so on. If utilitarianism cannot be bad, false, etc., how can anything possibly be a “problem” for it? In any case, if action guidance objec- tions are shown to depend on the above kind of controversial meta-ethical as- sumptions, this makes them weaker as objections to utilitarianism, as they will now inherit any problems that face their underlying meta-ethical views. So

53 _{Lenman (2000), pp. 367-370.}

54 _{Cf. Jonas Gren’s discussion of constructivism and the requirement that utilitarianism is action}

even if I do not address the above kind of meta-ethical objections in this book, there will be something gained by learning whether there are successful non- meta-ethical action guidance objections to utilitarianism – objections which do not carry any burdensome meta-ethical baggage. If there are no such ob- jections, that is good news for utilitarianism.