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Jiro comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If I tell you "you are morally required to do X", you can still reply "so what?". One can reply "so what?" to anything, and the fact that a moral theory doesn't prevent that is no objection to it.
(But, for clarity: what utilitarians say and others don't is less "if you want to maximize utility, do _" than "you should do _ because it maximizes utility". It's not obvious to me which of those you meant.)
A utilitarian might very well say that you are -- hence my remark that various other "it is morally obligatory to ..." statements could be part of a utilitarian theory. But what makes a theory utilitarian is not its choice of where to draw the line between obligatory and not-obligatory, but the fact that it makes moral judgements on the basis of an evaluation of overall utility.
I think it will become clear that this argument can't be right if you consider a variant in which the serial killer's income is much larger than yours: the conclusion would then be that nothing you can do can make you better than the serial killer. What's gone wrong here is that when you say "a serial killer is terrible, so I have to be better than he is" you're evaluating him on a basis that has little to do with net utility, whereas when you say "I must give away at least 70% of my income to be better than him" you're switching to net utility. It's not a big surprise if mixing incompatible moral systems gives counterintuitive results.
On a typical utilitarian theory:
and the latter two points are roughly what we mean by saying he's a very bad person and you should do better. But the metric by which he's very bad and you should do better is something like "net utility, relative to what you're in a position to produce".
But for the kind of utilitarianism you're describing, if you tell me "you are morally required to do X", I can say "so what" and be correct by your moral theory's standards. I can't do that in response to anything.
What do you mean by "correct"?
Your theory does not claim I ought to do something different.
It does claim something else would be morally better. It doesn't claim that you are obliged to do it. Why use the word "ought" only for the second and not the first?
Because that is what most English-speaking human beings mean by "ought".
It doesn't seem that way to me. It seems to me that "ought" covers a fairly broad range of levels of obligation, so to speak; in cases of outright obligation I would be more inclined to use "must" than "ought".