notnhngnoral-deactivated2016092 asked: are you a utilitarian? Search for the word in your blog returned nothing, which is odd because you have a whole section called big yud.

I wrote a bit about it here.  I guess I am probably consequentialist, at least sort of informally, since I tend to be OK with weird/gross/etc. stuff as long as it seems like it doesn’t harm anyone.  I don’t know if I’m a utilitarian specifically.

I feel like these ethical categories often aren’t very helpful.  Utilitarianism tends to produce pretty “obvious” conclusions until you get into aggregation issues, where the potential judgments get interesting but also where there is no consensus among utilitarians about which judgment to make.

They also interact oddly with psychology – it is not clear if a person who “believes in utilitarianism” is better, in utilitarian terms, than a person who “believes in virtue ethics,” and vice versa.  If I see someone identify one way or the other, I don’t feel like I learn much of anything about how they actually lead their life, besides “this person knows some stuff about ethical philosophy and talks to people who would care about these identifications” and the associated correlates (which are not at all trivial, mind you).