Your perception that the EA community profits from the perception of utilitarianism is the opposite of the reality; utilitarianism is more likely to have a negative perception in popular and academic culture, and we have put nontrivial effort into arguing that EA is safe and obligatory for non-utilitarians. You’re also ignoring the widely acknowledged academic literature on how axiology can differ from decision methods; sequence and cluster thinking are the latter.
I’ve talked with few people who seemed under the impression that the EA orgs making recommendations were performing some sort of quantitative optimization to maximize some sort of goodness metric, and used those recommendations on that basis, because they themselves accepted some form of normative utilitarianism.
It is perceived, that doesn’t mean the perception is beneficial. It’s better if people perceive EA as having weaker philosophical claims, like maximizing welfare in the context of charity, as opposed to taking on the full utilitarian theory and all it says about trolleys and torturing terrorists and so on. Quantitative optimization should be perceived as a contextual tool that comes bottom-up to answer practical questions, not tied to a whole moral theory. That’s really how cost-benefit analysis has already been used.
I’ve talked with few people who seemed under the impression that the EA orgs making recommendations were performing some sort of quantitative optimization to maximize some sort of goodness metric, and used those recommendations on that basis, because they themselves accepted some form of normative utilitarianism.
It is perceived, that doesn’t mean the perception is beneficial. It’s better if people perceive EA as having weaker philosophical claims, like maximizing welfare in the context of charity, as opposed to taking on the full utilitarian theory and all it says about trolleys and torturing terrorists and so on. Quantitative optimization should be perceived as a contextual tool that comes bottom-up to answer practical questions, not tied to a whole moral theory. That’s really how cost-benefit analysis has already been used.