[b450]

It's not really a reflection on utilitarianism. That's just philosophical ethics, at least in the form that predominates in Anglo-American philosophy departments.

The game of coming up with "counterexamples" to moral theories is fun, but basically stupid. By definition it involves "contriving" cases, however realistic really, which can make whatever preposterous "stipulations" they please. The underlying assumption is that moral theories are somehow like scientific theories in that they are validated by "predicting" the available observational "data", i.e. our moral intuitions, i.e. the social values of the cultural/economic groups we're a part of. Mysteriously, christian conservative scolds engage with philosophy and end up developing something a lot like christian social conservatism, and cosmopolitan liberal scolds come up with something a lot like cosmopolitan social liberalism, despite the fact that both are engaged in this highly scientific form of inquiry. Very odd.

The whole game is also probably largely irrelevant to the kind of stuff Bentham actually cared about, since he mainly wanted to use utilitarianism to guide state policy, and (famously) hard cases make bad law.