It should be pointed out that most people are neither utilitarians nor deontologists - not really. Most people are indeed very moral*, but only some people are primarily motivated by moral principles - and even fewer people are fundamentally motivated by a single principle, whether that principle be "Do that which brings the most pleasure to the most people," or "Do that which prevents the most pain to the most people," or "Act in such a way that you could at the same time will that the maxim of your action could be a universal law of nature," or even "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," or anything else. (Nor, for that matter, do people generally act according to the moral principles of Ayn Rand or the Austrian economists, or anyone else.) Sure, they tell themselves that this is what they are doing - principles like these, applied with elaborate enough complexity, are the ways that people rationalize their behavior, after the fact.
But in the moment, people are mostly motivated by a great jumble of impulses. Most of these are completely unconscious. In other cases, impulses may be partly conscious, but people often have difficulty articulating them in language. Often people won't even try to articulate them. Indeed, some impulses would be found embarrassing if people were willing to confront them. Even those moral motivations which take the form of principles usually come in groups of principles, which are often inconsistent or even directly opposed to each other.
Most people are guided partly by their own intuitions and partly by (what they perceive to be) cultural norms in their moral behavior - and of course, there's a great overlap between those. The process by which we absorb cultural norms is, itself, largely unconscious. Even among professional moral philosophers, I'd wager, it's only a tiny proportion of moral decisions that are consciously derived rationally from first principles.
One might assume that I am complaining when I say this. Not at all. On the contrary, I believe that intuition is often a better moral guide than language-based logic - subtler, more nuanced, stronger, more compelling, and faster. Compare it to catching a ball that has been thrown to you: if you think too much, in words, about how to catch the ball, you will probably fumble the catch. If you don't overthink it, and simply allow your body to catch the ball, you will catch it. Self-justifying axioms and logical rigor won't help you - the only way to get better is through practice.
This is the importance of what Adam Smith called the "moral sense." Or, as most people call it, a conscience.
There are, of course, times when one should override one's automatic moral intuitions. For instance, there may be times when one finds that one has immediately judged too harshly, or prejudged. We may indeed need complex social structures to overcome our own prejudice. When two people have competing moral claims, often they are each too "close" to their own perspectives and interests to be able to clearly separate the moral claim from their interest, and it is generally a good idea to bring in an impartial third person to mediate between them. I think most people understand this idea, which is likely, at least in part, the origin of social structures such as law courts and religious clerics - or, in another society, the tribal elders.
That having been said, these are, if not exceptional, then certainly not the majority of decisions. At the other extreme are ethical choices that can be made entirely intuitively. Most decisions will be somewhere in the middle, relying on a vast intuitive substrate, while also involving some conscious thought, quite possibly in language.
People who genuinely live their lives according to a rigorous principle, such as "Do that which causes the greatest good for the most people" remind me of Gendo Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion - contemptuous and dismissive of sentimentality and hesitation, doing what must be done to achieve one's duty. These people are freaks.
*= Of course, when I say that most people are moral, I don't mean that most people are morally good. Far from it. I merely mean that most people have moral feelings, such as guilt and remorse and righteous anger. If you like, instead of saying that most people are morally good, you could say that most people are morally neurotic.
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