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PhilGoetz comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong
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In this post, I wrote: "The standard view ... obliterates distinctions between the ethics of that person, the ethics of society, and "true" ethics (whatever they may be). I will call these "personal ethics", "social ethics", and "normative ethics" ."
Using that terminology, you're objecting to the more general point that social utility functions shouldn't be confused with personal utility functions. All mainstream discussion of utilitarianism has failed to make this distinction, including the literature on the utility monster.
However, it's still perfectly valid to talk about using utilitarianism to construct social utility functions (e.g., those to encode into a set of community laws), and in that context the utility monster makes sense.
Utilitarianism, and all ethical systems, are usually discussed with the flawed assumption that there is one single proper ethical algorithm, which, once discovered, should be chosen by society and implemented by every individual. (CEV is based on the converse of this assumption: that you can use a personal utility function, or the average of many personal utility functions. as a social utility function.)
That's because the mainstream discussion of utilitarianism the normative ethical theory has almost nothing at all to do with the concept of utility in economics.
I don't doubt that you're right, but I find that stunning. How can this distinction not be made?
In the trivial example Selfish World, everyone assigns greater utility to themselves than to anyone else. That surely doesn't mean utilitarianism is useless - people can still make decisions and trade utilons!
"Utility" refers a representation of preference over goods and services in economics and decision theory. This usage dates to the late 1940s. It has almost nothing at all to do with the normative theory of utilitarianism which dates to the late 1780s.
As a normative theory is supposed to tell you how you ought to act saying "oh everyone ought to follow their own utility function" is completely without content. The entire content of the theory is that my utils and your utils are actually the same kind of thing such that we can combine them one-to-one in a calculation to determine how to act (we want to maximize total utils).
This isn't utilitarianism. It is ethical egoism as described by economists.
That flaw is not obvious to me. But the flaw in anything-goes ethics is.