I suppose I'd agree with you that folk ethics aren't exactly deontological, though I'd have trouble calling them virtue ethics since I don't understand virtue ethics well enough to draw any predictive power out of it (and I'm not sure it's supposed to have predictive power in moral dilemmas).
My understanding is that you can look at virtue ethics as consequentialism that incorporates some important insights from game theory and Newcomb-like problems in decision theory (i.e. those where agents have some ability to predict each others' decisions). These concepts aren't incorporated via explicit understanding, which is still far from complete, but by observing people's actual intuitions and behaviors that were shaped by evolutionary processes (both biological and cultural), in which these game- and decision-theoretic issues have played a crucial role.
(Of course, such reduction to consequentialism is an arbitrary convention. You can reduce either consequentialism or deontology to each other just by defining the objective function or the deonotological rules suitably. I'm framing it that way just because you like consequentialism.)
Do you think this is specific to utilitarianism or more of a general issue with philosophy? David Hume didn't seriously stock up on candles in case the sun didn't rise the next morning, Objectivists probably do as many nice things for other people as anyone else, and economists don't convert en masse even though most don't have a good argument against stronger forms of Pascal's Wager.
Of course it's not specific to utilitarianism. It happens whenever some belief is fashionable and high-status but has seriously costly or inconvenient implications.
I generally agree with the rest of your comment. Ultimately, as long as we're talking about what happens in the real physical world rather than metaphysics, our reasoning is in some reasonable sense consequentialist. (Though I wouldn't go so far to say "utilitarian," since this gets us into the problem of interpersonal utility comparison.)
I think the essence of our disagreements voiced in previous discussions is that I'm much more pessimistic about our present ability to subject our moral intuitions (as well as the existing social customs, norms, and institutions that follow from them) to general-purpose reasoning. Even many fairly simple problems in game and decision theory are still open, and the issues (most of which are deeply non-obvious) that come into play with human social interactions, let alone large-scale social organization, are hopelessly beyond our current understanding. At the same time, it's hard to resist the siren call of plausible-sounding rationalizations for ideology and theories that are remote from reality but signal smarts and sophistication.
So says the title of an interesting recent paper I stumbled on yesterday (ungated link; h/t Chris Bertram). Here's the abstract:
This conclusion is very much along the lines of some of my recent LW comments (for example, those I left in this thread). To me it seems quite obvious that in the space of possible human minds, those that produce on the whole reasonably cooperative and reliably non-threatening behavior are overwhelmingly unlikely to produce utilitarian decisions in trolley-footbridge and similar "sacrificial" problems.
Of course, what people say they would do in situations of this sort is usually determined by signaling rather than a realistic appraisal. Kind and philosophical utilitarians of the sort one meets on LW would be extremely unlikely to act in practice according to the implications of their favored theories in real-life "sacrificial" situations, so their views are by themselves not strong evidence of antisocial personality traits. However, actually acting in such ways would be, in my opinion, very strong evidence for such traits, which is correctly reflected in the typical person's fear and revulsion of someone who is known to have acted like that. I would venture to guess that it is in fact the signaling-driven disconnect between people's endorsement of utilitarian actions and the actual decisions they would make that makes the found correlations fairly low. (Assuming also that these tests really are strong indicators of antisocial personalities, of course, which I lack the knowledge to judge.)
(Also, endorsement of utilitarianism even just for signaling value causes its own problems, since it leads to political and ideological support for all sorts of crazy ideas backed by plausible-sounding utilitarian arguments, but that's a whole different issue.)
Here is also a full citation for reference: “The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas”, by Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro, Cognition 121 (2011), pp. 154-161.
Edit: As Wei Dai points out in a comment, I should also add that some of the previous literature cited by Bartels and Pizarro has concluded that, in their words, "individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are... more likely to approve of utilitarian solution." One the face of it, taken together with the conclusions of this paper, this would mean that propensity for utilitarian responses may stem from different causes in different individuals (i.e. deliberative thinking versus antisocial traits).
My own hypothesis, however, is that deliberative thinking leads to verbal utilitarian responses that are likely due to signaling, and that propensity for actual utilitarian "sacrificial" acts would have a much weaker link to deliberative thinking and a much stronger link to antisocial traits than mere utilitarian statements. Unfortunately, I don't know how this could be tested empirically in an ethical manner.