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James_Miller comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (99)
For me utilitarianism means maximizing a weighted sum of everyone's utility, but the weights don't have to be equal. If you give yourself a high enough weight, no extreme self-sacrifice is necessary. The reason to be a utilitarian is that if some outcome is not consistent with it, it should be possible to make some people better off without making anyone worse off.
This is not a standard usage of the term "utilitarianism". You can have a weighting, for example based on capacity for suffering, but you can't weight yourself more just because you're you and call it utilitarianism.
But if you have to give yourself and your children the same weights as strangers than almost no one is a utilitarian.
I think that there's a difference between "nobody fulfills their moral obligations according to utilitarianism, or even tries very hard to" and "nobody believes that utilitarianism is the correct moral theory". People are motivated by lots of things other than what they believe the correct moral theory is.