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. ... Why don't we talk about the social meaning of ethics?
I get the impression that to a utilitarian, ethics doesn't have a "social meaning" in the sense that it deals with the way society pressures us to behave in a certain way. A utilitarian cares about other people, but ey doesn't pay too much attention to what society wants - given a choice between doing what society wants and doing the right thing, a utilitarian moral realist will try to do the right thing.
... a failure to properly distinguish between decision theory and what society pressures people to do. Most lesswrong users probably understand the distinction fairly clearly ...
They do indeed, but many of them probably deny that "what society pressures people to do" is the same thing as "what is right". And the utilitarians are able to embed their morality in their utility function, and so they use the same decision theory for what is 'right' and for what is 'advantageous'.
Have you ever met a utilitarian?
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?