There are a lot of different sorts of utilitarianism, and I'm not sure that all of them would lead to choosing not to have children. What's your line of thought that utilitarianism would lead to sterility?
Also, it wouldn't surprise me if many people who call themselves utilitarians actually mean they're more utilitarian than most people rather than that they're absolutely utilitarian. People (especially non-geeks) are very good at resilience in the face of memes.
Signaling might be even cruder and stupider than you imagine. How about "it's better to sound as though one has a highly intellectual system of ethics"?
What's your line of thought that utilitarianism would lead to sterility?
If you have a choice between feeding your kids and feeding someone elses, usually the other person's needs will be greater than your own. Even if you want to make more utilitarians, much the same applies.
More generally, the "memetic hijcking" model diverts resources from genes to memes - often leading to compromised fertility.
How about "it's better to sound as though one has a highly intellectual system of ethics"?
Something like that probably explains a lot ...
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?