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I think this distinction sounds like its missing the point.

The ethics question that is imlicit is "how should people reason when it comes to moral questions ". So if you say that you are a utilitarian but you don't reason in a utilitarian way then you seem to have changed the target of the conversation.

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I strongly disagree, for two reasons.

Firstly, it confuses moral theories and decision procedures. Ethical theories simply aren't, in the first instance, theories of "how people should reason". They're usually characterized as theories about *what makes an action right or wrong*; my (somewhat heterodox) view is that they would do better to be framed around the question of *what is fundamentally most important, or worth caring about*. But either way, these fundamental questions of ethical theory are very different from the practical question you raise. If you come to ethical theory thinking that the rival views are answering that practical question, you will come away badly confused.

As a theory, utilitarianism has *implications* for which decision procedure you should use. It says you should adopt whatever decision procedure is such that *your adopting it (i.e. reasoning in that way) would have the best consequences*. Which particular decision procedure actually meets this description is an empirical question, not a philosophical one. (Note that any theory X need not recommend reasoning in an X-ish way. For example, if the fate of the world depended upon your adopting an irrational decision procedure, any sane moral theory will agree that you ought to do precisely that -- make yourself irrational, if you can, in order to save the world.)

Secondly, my whole point is that *you don't know* what it is to "reason in a utilitarian way". To answer that, you would need to combine utilitarian goals with a theory of *instrumental rationality*. Many people ASSUME naive instrumentalism, without even realizing it. They have a picture in mind that actually involves the combination of utilitarianism + naive instrumentalism, but *mis-label* this picture as "reasoning in a utilitarian way". The whole point of my post was to explain why this is a mistake.

True "reasoning in a utilitarian way" involves combining utilitarian goals with whatever is the *correct* theory of instrumental rationality. I've offered some indications of what I think this involves. The precise details are open to question. But I'm pretty sure that naive instrumentalism is not the right answer, and so the caricatured understanding of "utilitarian reasoning" is actually an outright misconception.

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