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thomblake comments on This Didn't Have To Happen - Less Wrong
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Short answer? We don't. Not really. Human beings have an evolved moral instinct. These evolutionary moral inclinations lead to us assigning a high value to human life and well-being. The closest internally coherent seeming ethical structure seems to be utilitarianism. (It sounds bad for a rationalist to admit "I value all human life equally, except I value myself and my children somewhat more.")
But we are not really utilitarians. Our mental architecture doesn't allow most of us to really treat every stranger on earth as though they are as valuable as ourselves or our own children.
Shouldn't this be evidence that utilitarianism isn't close to the facts about ethics?
Only if you think we're wired to be ethical.
I believe that was part of what knb was saying.
The rest of our brains are wired to give close-enough approximations quickly, not to reliably produce correct answers (cf. cognitive biases). It's not a given that any coherent defition of ethics, even a correct one, should agree with our intuitive responses in all cases.