I suppose I'd agree with you that folk ethics aren't exactly deontological, though I'd have trouble calling them virtue ethics since I don't understand virtue ethics well enough to draw any predictive power out of it (and I'm not sure it's supposed to have predictive power in moral dilemmas). Maybe you're right about the distinction between folk moral actions and folk moral justifications - in the latter, people seem much more supportive of deontological justifications than utilitarian justifications, but I don't know how much effect that has on actual actions.
My own hypothesis is that being very philosophical tends to produce primarily utilitarian signaling in the form of words and relatively cheap symbolic actions, and very little or no serious utilitarian behavior.
Do you think this is specific to utilitarianism or more of a general issue with philosophy? David Hume didn't seriously stock up on candles in case the sun didn't rise the next morning, Objectivists probably do as many nice things for other people as anyone else, and economists don't convert en masse even though most don't have a good argument against stronger forms of Pascal's Wager. I don't really expect thoughts to influence ingrained behaviors that much, so it doesn't seem to require any special properties of utilitarianism to explain this.
Where we might have a deeper disagreement is when the output of these special modules should be seen as baggage we'd better get rid of, and when it has non-obvious but vitally important functions.
I'm not sure to what degree we disagree on that.
I would agree that the special modules have "important functions", but I would cash out "important" in a utiltiarian way: it would require an argument like "If we didn't have those modules people would do crazy things and society would collapse, which would be bad". This seems representative of a more general sense in which to resolve conflicts in our special moral reasoning we've got to apply general reasoning to them and utilitarianism is sort of the "common currency" that allows us to do that. Once we've done that we can link special moral reasoning to our more general reasoning and ground a lot of our intuitive moral rules. This is in the same sense that our visual processing modules are a heck of a lot better than trying to sort out luminance data from the environment by hand, but we still sometimes subject it to general-purpose reasoning when eg we're not sure if something is an optical illusion.
I suppose I'd agree with you that folk ethics aren't exactly deontological, though I'd have trouble calling them virtue ethics since I don't understand virtue ethics well enough to draw any predictive power out of it (and I'm not sure it's supposed to have predictive power in moral dilemmas).
My understanding is that you can look at virtue ethics as consequentialism that incorporates some important insights from game theory and Newcomb-like problems in decision theory (i.e. those where agents have some ability to predict each others' decisions). These c...
So says the title of an interesting recent paper I stumbled on yesterday (ungated link; h/t Chris Bertram). Here's the abstract:
This conclusion is very much along the lines of some of my recent LW comments (for example, those I left in this thread). To me it seems quite obvious that in the space of possible human minds, those that produce on the whole reasonably cooperative and reliably non-threatening behavior are overwhelmingly unlikely to produce utilitarian decisions in trolley-footbridge and similar "sacrificial" problems.
Of course, what people say they would do in situations of this sort is usually determined by signaling rather than a realistic appraisal. Kind and philosophical utilitarians of the sort one meets on LW would be extremely unlikely to act in practice according to the implications of their favored theories in real-life "sacrificial" situations, so their views are by themselves not strong evidence of antisocial personality traits. However, actually acting in such ways would be, in my opinion, very strong evidence for such traits, which is correctly reflected in the typical person's fear and revulsion of someone who is known to have acted like that. I would venture to guess that it is in fact the signaling-driven disconnect between people's endorsement of utilitarian actions and the actual decisions they would make that makes the found correlations fairly low. (Assuming also that these tests really are strong indicators of antisocial personalities, of course, which I lack the knowledge to judge.)
(Also, endorsement of utilitarianism even just for signaling value causes its own problems, since it leads to political and ideological support for all sorts of crazy ideas backed by plausible-sounding utilitarian arguments, but that's a whole different issue.)
Here is also a full citation for reference: “The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas”, by Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro, Cognition 121 (2011), pp. 154-161.
Edit: As Wei Dai points out in a comment, I should also add that some of the previous literature cited by Bartels and Pizarro has concluded that, in their words, "individuals with higher working memory capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are... more likely to approve of utilitarian solution." One the face of it, taken together with the conclusions of this paper, this would mean that propensity for utilitarian responses may stem from different causes in different individuals (i.e. deliberative thinking versus antisocial traits).
My own hypothesis, however, is that deliberative thinking leads to verbal utilitarian responses that are likely due to signaling, and that propensity for actual utilitarian "sacrificial" acts would have a much weaker link to deliberative thinking and a much stronger link to antisocial traits than mere utilitarian statements. Unfortunately, I don't know how this could be tested empirically in an ethical manner.