I'm happy to see these kinds of discussions. Here's the thing: one of the biggest problems to deontological approaches, as the parent pointed out, is that you

I'm happy to see these kinds of discussions. Here's the thing: one of the biggest problems to deontological approaches, as the parent pointed out, is that you end up with conflicts between values. But it's worse than that, because there's not a clear way to resolve these conflicts, and in my experience there's just a "hands throwing up" moment, along with a denial that the conflict existed, or an appeal to "maintaining values" without even recognizing that another value was abandoned. So you could turn this on its head, and argue that if deontological and utilitarian approaches are equivalent at some level, why not advocate for the approach that at least offers a framework for resolving conflicts in theory? If two values confict, how do you decide? More importantly, how do you decide without appealing to utility at some level, including implicitly? This gets into very high-level ethical reasoning issues and I'm not sure I would ascribe as purely utilitarian or deontological perspectives. But I think if you take the perspective of equivalence (and I think that's a reasonable perspective), there's not much grounds for saying you're not deontological or not utilitarian.