Have you ever met a utilitarian?
Not outside of a philosophy text or a blog posting, no, I haven't. But I'm pretty sure they do exist.
I exist. I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.
Is it in that sense, that you are pretty sure that utilitarians exist?
It seems to me that usually, when someone says "ethics" on lesswrong, ey usually means something along the lines of decision theory. When an average person says "ethics", ey is usually referring to a system of intuitions and social pressures designed to influence the behavior of members of a group. I think that a lot of the disagreement regarding ethics (i.e. consequentialism vs deontology) is rooted in a failure to properly distinguish between decision theory and what society pressures people to do. Most lesswrong users probably understand the distinction fairly clearly, but we only ever talk about decision theory. Why don't we talk about the social meaning of ethics?