Utilitarianism and its discontents
Ethics is complicated. Humans have evolved to feel a hodge-podge of different moral intuitions, each individually useful in facilitating coordination and cooperation in our ancestral environment. This means that the formulation of any ethical framework inherently involves a series of compromises between the relative importance of each of our intuitions, our desire for broad principles which can be consistently applied, and whatever value we place on those principles being widely shared by other people. I highly doubt that any ethical framework exists which doesn't violate at least one cherished moral intuition. Given this, our goal should be to find a compromise which uses consistent principles to align our actions with as many of our most important intuitions as we can. The first half of this essay attempts to reconcile several different ethical traditions, while maintaining that we should approach the most important decisions from a broadly utilitarian perspective; the second co