An example:

The eternal torture, isolation, and mutilation of an innocent child somewhere in a dark cavern is causally connected to the disappearance of all  diseases in the world. Under the strict utilitarian ethic it is not only permissible that this child be tortured it is obligated. If they are willing to commit atrocious evil to an innocent child under some delusion that this can be rightly justified then you are either dealing with someone who is too ignorant and prideful to admit the instability of his moral outlook or you're dealing with someone who is morally warped, perhaps evil.

To borrow a quote from Abscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy:

"But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind" (17).

Last edited by RomanJoe (11/20/2018 1:07 pm)

I agree with John.  There are many, many problems with the standard utilitarian account (which is why most academics have altered it to make it more coherent and palatable).

1)There is always an epistemology problem of determining whether your actions will actually maximize pleasure.  You just don't and can't know.

2) It's fairly clear that the good isn't pleasure in any standard way.  I can always ask, "Is this pleasure I am receiving good?"  Me asking that question demonstrates that, at least at a conceptual/linguistic level, we differentiate between pleasure and goodness.  

3) There are countless ways for the average person to make utilitarian sacrifices, but do not.  Is your hypothetical atheist, who is glad to sacrifice for the greater good, giving up all non-essential income to charity?  Is he vegan? Is he saving little sweatshop hands by abstaining from laptops and smartphones and tablets and video games?

4) suffering is essentially a relative phenomena, meaning it's power or force is relative to the one experiencing it (the entire rationale for both Buddhism and Stoicism is that suffering can be completely gotten rid of through your own mental fortitude). Going through suffering makes us stronger, and causes us to actually suffer less in the future. For example, imagine I jostle into two people in a crowd, one of these people is a pompous Hollywood actor, the other is a Holocaust survivor.  Whose day is more likely to be ruined from a mild jostling?  Utilitarianism can't incorporate this, because to do so one must acknowledge the pedagogical usefulness of suffering.

5) We have specific duties to specific people that over-ride a generic desire for maximal pleasure.  If my wife is drowning on one side of the pool, but two other people's wives are drowning on the other side, I am not hesitating to save my own wife.  Nor would I deny that a world with two dead wives is less full of pleasure than a world in which only my wife died.  But she's MY wife and I have have specific duties to her.  To quibble about that seems insane to me.

6) There are certain painless acts that we find inherently shameful.  For example, having sex with dead bodies. Insofar as you are satisfying a desire, and no one else finds about it, you are increasing pleasure.  But would you really claim that necrophilia is an ethical action?

There are other problems with utilitarianism, but these are some of the commonest and most frequently discussed. I would question whether the atheist you are talking to actually lives out his utilitarianism, and whether he can account for all of the holes this theory has.

One thing that strikes me is that skeptical theism has a similar form to mysterian replies. In other words, it argues from the possibility that there is a solution to x problem (the problem of evil, in this case) that we simply can't see because of our cognitive limitations. It's perfectly reasonable that there are things we can't see because of our cognitive limitations. The trouble is that once you allow these kinds of replies, it seems you have to allow others to make them as well, e.g. the naturalist can say there are naturalist solutions to PSR-related problems or problems in philosophy of mind that are (or might be) simply beyond our cognitive abilities to grasp.

Or maybe it has been too long since I looked at literature on the problem of evil. (Well, there are so many good replies to it and so many other things to look into.)

Utilitarianism can take several forms, but I think there are a number of rather strong arguments against it. The breezy use of abstract terms like "the greatest good [sometimes: for the greatest number]" conceal the sheer number of options here and gloss over the fact that for utilitarianism to do what it's supposed to, a lot of arbitrary points have to be decided.

1) Incommensurability, as John mentioned. If we compare two goods, for instance, there needs to be an answer to the question of which one is better. This is not just a point about vagueness, that assuming these questions to be generally good, we might have cases where it is indeterminate which of two things is better. You can see this where the enjoyment of two goods is roughly quantifiable. Suppose the question is whether A or B is better. If it is suggested that the only reason we can't say is that it is vague (as saying which of two people, with slightly different hair patterns and hair lengths, has less hair, might be vague), then just consider whether A or C is better, where C is a prolonged enjoyment of B. If such comparisons are in fact quantitative comparisons, then such a device should be able to remove concerns about vagueness, but they don't, for there will be cases where the comparison between A and C is also impossible to make.

2) "The greatest good for the greatest number" contains a double comparative which requires disambiguation to single out a determinate state of affairs. For if you just choose the slightly better outcome for the most people, you can get what one would intuitively regard as result inferior to a far better outcome for a slightly smaller number of people. (this argument is due to Geach)

3) If you cut out "for the greatest number," and just try to talk about "the greatest good" or "the total of all goodness," then you will have to decide how this number is to be computed. The various options all seem to fit poorly with intuition. Intuitively, a society in which there are very happy people is supposed to be what the utilitarian is after. But if goods are to be summed, then for any such society, there is a much larger society with much less happy people which utilitarianism judges to be better. So we might try averaging. But then a society in which people are generally happy but one person is very unhappy will be just as good as a proportionately larger society. But this means that the universe may contain arbitrarily large amounts of evil (and that this will be better than many cases in which it contains no evil). There might be other principles to try to fit our intuitions (averaging goods and summing evils has been suggested), but these will open up other problems, and generally compromises the purported simplicity of utilitarianism. (this argument is due to Parfit)

4) Goodness is kind-relative. In a wide variety of case, "A is good" only makes sense if it is short for "A is a good F," where the substantive 'F' provides the standard of evaluation according to which A is judged to be good or bad. (A good thief may be a bad man. A good knife has few properties in common with a good movie.) Some other cases are derivative: "A is good" may have to be clarified as meaning "A is good for B," where A in some sense contributes to the interests of B, which are determined in the first sense. (The weather is neither good nor bad simpliciter, though it may be good for the eggplants my neighbor is growing and bad for me, who intends to go to the beach.) But utilitarianism seems to require that states of affairs, events, or things as such provide standards of evaluation, so that it can direct us to promote good states of affairs, events, or things. But these notions are too thin to do that. (this argument is also due to Geach, in his paper "Good and Evil"; I think things can get fairly complicated here. There is some sense to be preserved in the idea that a human being is a better or more perfect being than a cat, even though they do not fall under a substantive that supplies the requisite standard [genuses like 'animal' do not seem to do so]. And it is true that we call people 'good men' but rarely call cactuses 'good cactuses,' tending to prefer 'flourishing' or 'healthy', and that this piece of linguistic data is probably important. But I think that it is true that what utilitarianism needs is not to be had.)

5) Pleasure is a more complicated phenomenon than hedonic utilitarianism takes it to be. It is hard to imagine that hedonic utilitarians have pleasures and pains other than the ones associated with food, sex, hunger, illness, etc. in mind, where the pleasure seems to be something distinctively phenomenal, like a sensation. But lots of pleasures are nothing like this (intellectual pleasures, the pleasure one takes in company, the enjoyment one takes in a sport which requires physical exertion). Pleasure moreover is taken in activities and seems not to be a simple sensation; it has, for instance, an object, and does not seem to be itself the point of a lot of what we do.

Calhoun wrote:

Isn't the truth of something like Utilitarianism required for theodicies like Soul-making and Sceptical theism to work?. If so, I think theists shouldn't reject it.

I have sometimes thought that the rejection of so much as the possibility of utilitarianism can go some way toward disarming the problem of evil. If goods are incommensurable, then there might be goods which are made possible only as a result of evil, the goodness of which could not be substituted for the goodness of anything that would have been possible had the evil not occurred. For instance, salvation. A soul cannot stand in need of redemption unless there has been a fall. The fall need not have occurred, and there would have been various goods associated with that, but if the redemption of a particular soul is incommensurable with these goods and with the evil which made it possible, then there is no answer to the question of which of these two outcomes is better. 

I would say also though that utilitarianism is probably not essential to making those other defenses. The falsity of utilitarianism does not imply that consequences are irrelevant or cannot sometimes decide matters. It can sometimes be a challenge to see what relevance they can have if incommensurability is true.

Greg wrote:

Calhoun wrote:

Isn't the truth of something like Utilitarianism required for theodicies like Soul-making and Sceptical theism to work?. If so, I think theists shouldn't reject it.

I have sometimes thought that the rejection of so much as the possibility of utilitarianism can go some way toward disarming the problem of evil. If goods are incommensurable, then there might be goods which are made possible only as a result of evil, the goodness of which could not be substituted for the goodness of anything that would have been possible had the evil not occurred. For instance, salvation. A soul cannot stand in need of redemption unless there has been a fall. The fall need not have occurred, and there would have been various goods associated with that, but if the redemption of a particular soul is incommensurable with these goods and with the evil which made it possible, then there is no answer to the question of which of these two outcomes is better. 

I would say also though that utilitarianism is probably not essential to making those other defenses. The falsity of utilitarianism does not imply that consequences are irrelevant or cannot sometimes decide matters. It can sometimes be a challenge to see what relevance they can have if incommensurability is true.

Good points, but still responses to POE might not essentially depend on Utiltitarianism but some of them seem to take notion of "greater good" along the same lines.

Some time ago I was reading "Problem of Evil as Moral objection to theism" By Toby Betenson.
In one of the chapters he argues for the above claim, with reference to Soul-Making theodicy. IIRC he also made a claim that these theodicies are unacceptable along the same lines as Peter Singer's moral philosophy is. 

There was also an article named "God is a consequentialist" by an Atheist Philosopher/blogger I read a while ago.

You might want to check these works.