> I do not believe utilitarianism is sound, because its logic can be easily used to justify some obviously horrible things.
I think most moral philosophers agree with you on that.
IMO, the way people talk about Utilitarianism feels to me exactly the same as my own feelings when at school, having only been taught 2D vectors and basic trig functions, I spent 6 months trying to figure out what it even meant to render in 3D — in particular the sense of pride when I arrived at two useful frameworks (which I later learned were unshaded 3D projection and ray-marching).
By analogy: while that's a good start, there's a long way from that to even Doom/Marathon let alone modern rendering; similarly while Utilitarianism is a good start, it's only saying "good and bad can be quantified and added" and falls over very quickly when you involve even moderately sized groups of spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum people with finite capacity for experiencing utils. It also very definitely can't tell you what you should value, because of the is/ought divide.
Once your model for people is complex enough to admit that some of them are into BDSM, I don't think the original model of simple pluses and minuses can even ascribe a particular util level any more.
Utility can't be one dimensional and it probably isn't linear.
In other words, we would have to treat most situations as unique and then try to find patterns and then the whole rationalism thing goes out of the window.
Only spherical-rationalism-in-a-vacuum goes out the window.
Unfortunately, and this goes back to my previous point, lots of people (I'm not immune!) mistake taking the first baby step for climbing the whole mountain.
I think most moral philosophers agree with you on that.
IMO, the way people talk about Utilitarianism feels to me exactly the same as my own feelings when at school, having only been taught 2D vectors and basic trig functions, I spent 6 months trying to figure out what it even meant to render in 3D — in particular the sense of pride when I arrived at two useful frameworks (which I later learned were unshaded 3D projection and ray-marching).
By analogy: while that's a good start, there's a long way from that to even Doom/Marathon let alone modern rendering; similarly while Utilitarianism is a good start, it's only saying "good and bad can be quantified and added" and falls over very quickly when you involve even moderately sized groups of spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum people with finite capacity for experiencing utils. It also very definitely can't tell you what you should value, because of the is/ought divide.
Once your model for people is complex enough to admit that some of them are into BDSM, I don't think the original model of simple pluses and minuses can even ascribe a particular util level any more.