I don’t have a clear enough idea of what utilitarianism entails exactly
While there are several flavors of utilitarianism, they all involve some definition of utility which is computed per individual and then aggregated over the whole society. When making choices the moral option is the one that gives the highest aggregate utility. The most common variants for utility are “happiness” and “preference satisfaction” while the most common methods of aggregation are summing and averaging. Wikipedia may be helpful.
Note that Utilitarianism isn’t required for the argument in the post. You just need to think that others matter and do the multiplication.
overall I consider it more useful for thinking about say, public policy than it is about individual choices
It is widely used in public health, but I don’t see why we should have a different morality at large scale than small.
I think it’s more useful to try to understand things like incentives or happiness or lost purposes or mechanism design or institutions or the history of morality than it is to try to describe/verbalize one’s moral “system”.
So how do you go about determining whether something is moral?
While there are several flavors of utilitarianism, they all involve some definition of utility which is computed per individual and then aggregated over the whole society. When making choices the moral option is the one that gives the highest aggregate utility. The most common variants for utility are “happiness” and “preference satisfaction” while the most common methods of aggregation are summing and averaging. Wikipedia may be helpful.
Note that Utilitarianism isn’t required for the argument in the post. You just need to think that others matter and do the multiplication.
It is widely used in public health, but I don’t see why we should have a different morality at large scale than small.
So how do you go about determining whether something is moral?