  If overall utility is the criterion of moral rightness, then it might seem that nobody could know what is morally right. If so, classical utilitarianism leads to moral skepticism. However, utilitarians insist that we can have strong reasons to believe that certain acts reduce utility, even if we have not yet inspected or predicted every consequence of those acts. For example, in normal circumstances, if someone were to torture and kill his children, it is possible that this would maximize utility, but that is very unlikely. Maybe they would have grown up to be mass murders, but it is at least as likely that they would grow up to cure serious diseases or do other great things, and it is much more likely that they would have led normally happy (or at least not destructive) lives. So observers as well as agents have adequate reasons to believe that such acts are morally wrong, according to act utilitarianism. In many other cases, it will still be hard to tell whether an act will maximize utility, but that shows only that there are severe limits to our knowledge of what is morally right. That should be neither surprising nor problematic for utilitarians.