I didn’t say it was “the right thing” to do. I said it was was moral then what I am actually planning to do. You seem to just be assuming people are required to act in the way they find most moral. I don’t think this is a reasonable thing to ask of people.
Utilitarian conclusions clearly contain more info than “yay X.” Since they typically allow one to compare different positive options as to which is more positive. In addition in many contexts utilitarianism gives you a framework for debating what to do. Many people will agree the primary goal of laws in the USA should be to maximize utility for US citizens/residents as long as the law won’t dramatically harm non-residents (some libertarians disagree but I am just making a claim on what people think). Under these conditions utilitarianism tells you what to do.
Utilitarianism does not tell you how to act in daily life. Since its unclear how much you should weigh the morality of an action against other concerns.
A moral theory that doesn’t tell you how to act in daily life seems incomplete, at least in comparison to e.g. deontological approaches. If one defines a moral framework as something that does tell you how to act in daily life, as I suspect many of the people you’re thinking of do, then to the extent that utilitarianism is a moral framework, it requires extreme self-sacrifice (because the only, or at least most obvious, way to interpret utilitarianism as something that does tell you how to act in daily life is to interpret it as saying that you are required to act in the way that maximizes utility).
So on some level it’s just an argument about definitions, but there is a real point: either utilitarianism requires this extreme self-sacrifice, or it is something substantially less useful in daily life than deontology or virtue ethics.
I didn’t say it was “the right thing” to do. I said it was was moral then what I am actually planning to do. You seem to just be assuming people are required to act in the way they find most moral. I don’t think this is a reasonable thing to ask of people.
Utilitarian conclusions clearly contain more info than “yay X.” Since they typically allow one to compare different positive options as to which is more positive. In addition in many contexts utilitarianism gives you a framework for debating what to do. Many people will agree the primary goal of laws in the USA should be to maximize utility for US citizens/residents as long as the law won’t dramatically harm non-residents (some libertarians disagree but I am just making a claim on what people think). Under these conditions utilitarianism tells you what to do.
Utilitarianism does not tell you how to act in daily life. Since its unclear how much you should weigh the morality of an action against other concerns.
A moral theory that doesn’t tell you how to act in daily life seems incomplete, at least in comparison to e.g. deontological approaches. If one defines a moral framework as something that does tell you how to act in daily life, as I suspect many of the people you’re thinking of do, then to the extent that utilitarianism is a moral framework, it requires extreme self-sacrifice (because the only, or at least most obvious, way to interpret utilitarianism as something that does tell you how to act in daily life is to interpret it as saying that you are required to act in the way that maximizes utility).
So on some level it’s just an argument about definitions, but there is a real point: either utilitarianism requires this extreme self-sacrifice, or it is something substantially less useful in daily life than deontology or virtue ethics.