The utilitarian recognises no moral absolutes, no action which could not be justified by 'further and better particulars', no injustice which might not also be the right thing to do. He is obsessed with a particular paradigm of rationality—'instrumental reasoning', or the calculation of means to a single and measurable end. For the utilitarian there is something irrational in the refusal to reason further; if morality is to be based in reason, then all questions are open until reasoning brings them to a close. His morality is really a species of economics, in which profit and loss have been replaced by pleasure and pain, and in which no moral problems occur which could not be solved by a competent accountant. It is nearer the truth, I maintain, to think of morality as setting the limits to economic reasoning, rather than being a species of it. Moral principles tell us precisely that we must go no further along the path of calculation and that the desire to do so is a kind of corruption. That this corruption is the ruling vice of modern societies gives us no grounds for condoning it.
(Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs, 3d ed. [London: Metro Books, 2000], 60 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 