Utilitarianism doesn’t describe how you should feel, it simply describes “the good”. It’s very possible that if accepting utilitarianism’s implications is so abhorrent to you that the world would be a worse place because you do it (because you’re unhappy, or because embracing utilitarianism might actually make you worse at promoting utility), then by all means… don’t endorse it, at least not at some given level you find repugnant. This is what Derek Parfit labels a “self-effacing” philosophy, I believe.
There are a variety of approaches to actually being a practicing utilitarian, however. Obviously we don’t have the computational power required to properly deduce every future consequence of our actions, so at a practical level utilitarians will always support heuristics of some sort. One of these heuristics may dictate that you should always prefer serial killers to be shot over your sister for the kinds of reasons that gjm describes. This might not always lead to the right conclusion from a utilitarian perspective, but it probably wouldn’t be a blameworthy one, as you did the best you could under incomplete information about the universe.
Utilitarianism doesn’t describe how you should feel, it simply describes “the good”. It’s very possible that if accepting utilitarianism’s implications is so abhorrent to you that the world would be a worse place because you do it (because you’re unhappy, or because embracing utilitarianism might actually make you worse at promoting utility), then by all means… don’t endorse it, at least not at some given level you find repugnant. This is what Derek Parfit labels a “self-effacing” philosophy, I believe.
There are a variety of approaches to actually being a practicing utilitarian, however. Obviously we don’t have the computational power required to properly deduce every future consequence of our actions, so at a practical level utilitarians will always support heuristics of some sort. One of these heuristics may dictate that you should always prefer serial killers to be shot over your sister for the kinds of reasons that gjm describes. This might not always lead to the right conclusion from a utilitarian perspective, but it probably wouldn’t be a blameworthy one, as you did the best you could under incomplete information about the universe.