(Return to main path )

Hold on just a minute. Let's not pile on utilitarianism and pound it into the ground. If we do that, we may be throwing away the baby with the bath.

Maybe there is something valuable in utilitarianism. If so, we have to figure out what it is. I want to offer a suggestion.

One way to think about utilitarianism is as a theory that applies to part of the moral world but not to all of it. In other words, it doesn't cover all moral decisions, but it isn't totally useless either. More specifically:

• Maybe utilitarianism needs to be supplemented with some other principle or principles.
  
  
• Maybe utilitarianism needs to be confined to a subset of moral questions.

My suggestion is that utilitarianism needs to be supplemented by a theory of rights and confined to the public sphere (i.e., to government decisions).
By adding a theory of rights, we would eliminate the possibility of sacrificing some individuals for the sake of an aggregate result. By confining utilitarian calculations to government decisions we would be using it in a place where impartiality is appropriate.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Here's another possibility. The philosopher Ronald Dworkin has suggested that utilitarianism (thought of as preference satisfaction) can be made much more acceptable if it excludes certain preferences. Dworkin identified the problem as what he called "external" preferences. These are preferences that people have for the treatment of others and not simply preferences for themselves. For example, some white people may prefer that black people be excluded from legislatures or state colleges. That would be an external preference and Dworkin thought that when calculating welfare or preference satisfaction it should be left out of the tally. My point is that there may be ways to hold on to some of the fundamental insights of utilitarianism and yet modify the theory to eliminate some of the counter-intuitive consequences that the standard forms of utilitarianism produce.