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In “Contemporary Utilitarianism,” Julia Driver discusses four common objections to utilitarianism and how utilitarians have attempted to counter them. According to the first objection, utilitarianism conflicts with our strongly held intuitions regarding justice. For example, utilitarianism would recommend sacrificing an innocent person to an angry mob, if doing so would prevent deadly riots. Some utilitarians have sought to avoid conclusions of this sort by distinguishing act-utilitarianism, which holds that right actions are those that have the best consequences, from rule-utilitarianism, which holds that right actions are those that conform to rules that, if followed, maximize utility. The worry, however, is that a consistent rule-utilitarianism seems like a form of irrational rule-worship.
The second objection concerns the demandingness of utilitarianism. According to its critics, utilitarianism conflates the supererogatory with the obligatory and, as a result, expands the scope of moral requirements too widely. For example, it appears that utilitarianism is committed to the view that spending money on new clothes, technological gadgets, expensive meals, and the like is morally wrong when that money can be donated to relief organizations providing life-saving aid to the desperately poor. Some utilitarians, however, try to dispel this appearance by arguing that demandingness robs people of incentives, making them unhappy and apathetic, and therefore less productive and able to do good.
The third problem for utilitarianism concerns personal integrity. Because of its doctrine of negative responsibility, utilitarianism requires us to put aside, or even violate, our personal values and normative commitments whenever doing so would maximize the good. This point was illustrated by Bernard Williams in his famous case of Jim, in which a man is forced to decide between killing one innocent person or allowing that person, and nineteen others, to be killed by someone else. For utilitarians, the correct moral choice is simple: the man must kill the one, regardless of whatever personal reservations he has about killing. Many utilitarians are inclined to bite the bullet in this case, arguing that we have a strong intuitive commitment to negative responsibility and that anyone unwilling or unable to put aside his personal convictions for the greater good is guilty of moral squeamishness. Finally, utilitarianism strikes many as highly counter-intuitive because its emphasis on impartiality means that the special consideration we ordinarily give to our family and friends may be morally unjustifiable. Peter Railton, however, has argued that utilitarians can accommodate partiality because without it, close relationships between people would break down, leaving the world less happy overall as a result.