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blacktrance comments on 2014 Survey of Effective Altruists - Less Wrong
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I don't think that hedonistic utilitarianism necessarily implies moral realism. Some HUs will certainly tell you that the people who morally disagree with them are misguided, but I don't see why the proportion of HUs who think so (vs. the proportion of HUs who think that you are simply caring about different things) would need to be any different than it would be among the adherents of any other ethical position.
Maybe you meant your comment to refer specifically to the kinds of HUs who would impose their position on you, but even then the moral realism doesn't follow. You can want to impose your values on others despite thinking that values are just questions of opinion. For instance, there are things that I consider basic human rights and I want to impose the requirement to respect them on every member of every society, even though there are people who would disagree with that requirement. I don't think that the people who disagree are misguided in any sense, I just think that they value different things.
Any form of utilitarianism implies moral realism, as utilitarianism is a normative ethical theory and normative ethical theories presuppose moral realism.
I feel that this discussion is rapidly descending into a debate over definitions, but as a counter-example, take ethical subjectivism, which is a form of moral non-realism and which Wikipedia defines as claiming that:
Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and say that utilitarianism is the theory that best describes their particular attitudes, or at least that subset of their attitudes that they endorse.
Someone could be an ethical subjectivist and want to maximize world utility, but such a person would not be a utilitarian, because utilitarianism holds that other people should maximize world utility. If you merely say "I want to maximize world utility and others to do the same", that is not utilitarianism - a utilitarian would say that you ought to maximize world utility, even if you don't want to, and it's not a matter of attitudes. Yes, this is arguing over definitions to some extent, but it's important because I often see this kind of confusion about utilitarianism on LW.
Could you provide a reference for that? At least the SEP entry on the topic doesn't clearly state this. I'm also unsure of what difference this makes in practice - I guess we could come up with a new word for all the people who are both moral antirealist and utilitarian-aside-for-being-moral-antirealists, but I'm not sure if the difference in their behavior and beliefs is large enough for that to be worth it.
Non egoistic subjectivists?
The SEP entry for consequentialism says it "is the view that normative properties depend only on consequences", implying a belief in normative properties, which means moral realism.
If you want to describe people's actions, a utilitarian and a world-utility-maximizing non-realist would act similarly, but there would be differences in attitude: a utilitarian would say and feel like he is doing the morally right thing and those who disagree with him are in error, whereas the non-realist would merely feel like he is doing what he wants and that there is nothing special about wanting to maximize world utility - to him, it's just another preference, like collecting stamps or eating ice cream.
This is getting way too much into a debate over definitions so I'll stop after this comment, but I'll just point out that, among professional philosophers, there is no correlation between endorsing consequentialism and endorsing moral realism.
A non-consequentialist could be a moral realist as well, such as if they were a deontologist, so it's not a good measurement.
Also, consequentialism and moral realism aren't always well-defined terms.
Edit: That survey's results are strange. Twenty people answered that they're moral realists but non-cognitivists, though moral realism is necessarily cognitivist.
That doesn't mean utilitarianism is subjective. Rather, it means any subjective idea could correspond to objective truth.