Don’t know if I am preaching to the choir, but with how much libs try to use the trolley problem to support their favorite war criminal, it got me thinking just how cringe utilitarianism is.
Whatever utilitarianism may be in theory, in practice, it just trains people to think like bureaucrats who belive themselves to be impartial observers of society (not true), holding power over the lives of others for the sake of the common good. It’s imo a perfect distillation of bourgeois ideology into a theory of ethics. It’s a theory of ethics from the pov of a statesman or a capitalist. Only those groups of people have the power and information necessary to actually act in a meaningfully utilitarian manner.
It’s also note worthy just how prone to creating false dichotomies and ignoring historical context utilitarians are. Although this might just be the result of the trolley problem being so popular.
Maybe this is me being a vulgar materialist but on a larger scale I think ethical considerations are mostly normative and derived from power relations, and superstructural. There’s a strong tension to define right and wrong around whatever material/class interests are at play.
It’s good that there’s people thinking about ethics and trying to hash out detailed and coherent models and whatnot, but I think for most if not all people ethics is gonna be very vibey and dynamic, maybe instinctive or intuitive.
Which meshes, I think, with your final statement. Actually-existing ethics isn’t particularly scientific nor mathematical. Imo it’s constantly being produced between people at every level of relationship, and philosophical models are tools that help us communicate and hone in on ethical concepts, perhaps identify contradictions and power dynamics.