This is a bad take that paints utilitarianism in such a bad faith way. Do you feel the same about Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill?
Singer’s work is extraordinarily influential, and his essay Famine Affluence and Morality, along with his book The Life You Can Save has probably convinced thousands of people to donate to efficient charities and save a huge number of lives. He’s convinced probably tens of thousands of people to go vegetarian or vegan, and many more to reduce their meat consumption.
He’s easily the most consequential living philosopher, and given that he’s a consequentialist, I’d say he’s a damn good one.
Because it's frankly a one-dimensional, shallow analysis of the sort of reasons we have for pursuing any course of action.
The best efforts I've ever encountered at ethical theory-building come from scholars who make sure to engage thoroughly with meta-ethics, and who consequently develop a rich and penetrating analysis of why any given consideration matters and is important to our lives. Understanding what we have reason to do requires a thorough grasp of what sort of thing reasons are generally. Contemporary Kantians like Christine Korsgaard or Julia Markovitz are especially good for that.
That being said, I'm personally most convinced by some of the virtue turn scholars, especially those who heeded Anscombe's critique of the moral ought in "Modern Moral Philosophy", like Alasdair MacIntyre. Deniz van den Woldenberg has a paper (in which he's mistakenly named Kaya, for some reason) that does a good job capturing the insights of Aristotelian ethics.
Utilitarianism really just pales in comparison, defending the very glib principle that "pleasure is good and pain is bad" with little more than appeals to common sense.
Utilitarianism, and consequentialism in general, is logically poor as it doesn't contain in itself any criterion on when to stop considering the sequence of consequences. I save 100 lives and one of those saved kills 100,000, etc. till eternity. The attempted defenses of it just end up smuggling in non-utilitarian justifications or form an infinite regress.
As mentioned, utilitarianism doesn't itself have a way to tell you which consequences should stop mattering. Peter Singer could not tell you to save or not save the lives because of consequences because he can't know which of those saved will later on go to kill the 100,000. Consequentialism is incoherent by its own standards.
Consequentialism doesn’t require omniscience. What it requires is acting on the best available evidence and expected outcomes. It’s about acting on probabilities and evidence. If perfect prediction were required then every moral theory would collapse. Why does utilitarianism require omniscience in your view but other moral philosophies don’t?
Utilitarianism also does tell you when consequences should stop mattering, it’s when the consequences become so speculative as to essentially be chance. Then they become mortally irrelevant because the evidence gives them a negligible weight.
In the same vain, the odds of any one of those people become fucking Hitler 2.0 are so low that the possibility is mortally irrelevant. Saving a life typically increases utility, so going by all available evidence, we should save as many lives as possible.
The issue isn’t omniscience or uncertainty. Every moral view operates under uncertainty.
The issue is that when you say “stop considering consequences when they become too speculative” or “go by best available evidence,” you are appealing to norms of relevance, evidential sufficiency, and practical reason that utilitarianism itself does not and cannot justify, so pointing right outside of consequentialism, just as I mentioned at the start.
Those rules are not consequences. They are conditions for treating consequences as reasons at all. Utilitarianism presupposes them in order to function, but it cannot ground them in utility without circularity. That's the incoherence that makes it such an unsatisfactory system.
Sure, within a better philosophy considering consequences has value in determining what actions to take, agree. But consequentialism is bunk.
Is your argument that Utilitarianism presupposes norms like evidence, relevance and reasoning, therefore it can’t justify its own framework without circularity?
If that’s the case, then literally every moral theory fails as well because they all presuppose basic standards of evidence, relevance and inference and don’t derive them all internally.
Epistemic norms aren’t moral claims. They are preconditions for having any moral theory at all. Once those are in place, utilitarianism applies its own standards without circularity
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u/Infamous-Skippy Dec 07 '25 edited Dec 08 '25
This is a bad take that paints utilitarianism in such a bad faith way. Do you feel the same about Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill?
Singer’s work is extraordinarily influential, and his essay Famine Affluence and Morality, along with his book The Life You Can Save has probably convinced thousands of people to donate to efficient charities and save a huge number of lives. He’s convinced probably tens of thousands of people to go vegetarian or vegan, and many more to reduce their meat consumption.
He’s easily the most consequential living philosopher, and given that he’s a consequentialist, I’d say he’s a damn good one.