Your intuitions will be biased to favoring a sibling over a stranger. Evolution has seen to that, i.e. kin selection.
Utilitarianism tries to maximize utility for all, regardless of relatedness. Even if you adjust the weightings for individuals based on likelihood of particular individuals having a greater impact on overall utility, you don’t (in general) get weightings that will match your intuitions.
I think it is unreasonable to expect your moral intuitions to ever approximate utilitarianism (or vice versa) unless you are making moral decisions about people you don’t know at all.
In reality, the money I spend on my two cats could be spent improving the happiness of many humans—humans that I don’t know at all who are living a long way away from me. Clearly I don’t apply utilitarianism to my moral decision to keep pets. I am still confused about how much I should let utilitarianism shift my emotionally-based lifestyle decisions.
Your intuitions will be biased to favoring a sibling over a stranger. Evolution has seen to that, i.e. kin selection.
Utilitarianism tries to maximize utility for all, regardless of relatedness. Even if you adjust the weightings for individuals based on likelihood of particular individuals having a greater impact on overall utility, you don’t (in general) get weightings that will match your intuitions.
I think it is unreasonable to expect your moral intuitions to ever approximate utilitarianism (or vice versa) unless you are making moral decisions about people you don’t know at all.
In reality, the money I spend on my two cats could be spent improving the happiness of many humans—humans that I don’t know at all who are living a long way away from me. Clearly I don’t apply utilitarianism to my moral decision to keep pets. I am still confused about how much I should let utilitarianism shift my emotionally-based lifestyle decisions.