Utilitarianism, Moral Dilemmas, and Moral Cost

Abstract

Abstract Utilitarianism has been charged in a number of different ways with oversimplifying morality and the moral life. But the present paper will confine its attention to two closely related ways in which this criticism can be made. Utilitarianism has recently been accused both of blindness to the possibility of moral dilemmas and of an inability to conceive the idea of moral cost, and in what follows I would like to respond to these charges, not, in the perhaps expectable utilitarian fashion, by admitting them but denying their destructive force against utilitarianism, but by questioning the truth of the charges. It is certainly true that (act-) utilitarian, and, more broadly, (act-) consequentialist moral theories have almost always been presented in ways that seem to preclude moral dilemmas and moral costs, but this appearance results from a tendency to overlook certain historically important forms of utilitarianism and from a failure to recognize the implications of the traditional utilitarian appeal to universal impersonal benevolence. I hope, therefore, to show that the dilemmas and costs that have recently been said to characterize ordinary moral thinking can be plausibly modelled within (act-) utilitarian moral theory. Whether this unsuspected capacity for complexity will be welcome to utilitarians and whether it will take the edge off some of the criticism that has been directed at utilitarianism by defenders of common-sense morality are questions to be discussed at the end of this essay.

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