I don't particularly care for utilitarianism. It can make the fairly obvious cases rigorous, but it doesn't do a good job of drawing fine distinctions -- for ex

I don't particularly care for utilitarianism. It can make the fairly obvious cases rigorous, but it doesn't do a good job of drawing fine distinctions -- for example, the variations of the Trolley Problem. When two utilitarians disagree in their cost/benefit function, utilitarianism doesn't provide a mechanism to resolve it. That's not meant to discourage anybody from utilitarianism. There is no obviously better system. And we do need some basis on which to make decisions. I am just wary of utilitarianism for myself because I distrust its potentially confident-but-wrong conclusions. I do think it's a very useful framework for elucidating the problems. Why is it we are willing to pull a lever to let the train kill one person, but unwilling to push a fat guy in front of it? I think that utilitarianism highlights the differences for exploring the moral intuition. I have a poorly-elaborated notion that the moral intuition has some kind of universal, biological basis -- perhaps similar in origin to Chomsky's Universal Grammar. If that's true, we might be able to learn something from the neurobiology of moral decision-making. And that might in turn put utilitarianism on a firmer footing, or prove that no such footing is possible. Just my $.02.