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Notes -
Not to get even more misanthropic but is it possible that some people are so bad at reasoning that we are better off if they just decide everything by gut instinct? At least their conscience will provide some grounding and they won't be tempted to start changing the calendar and murdering the bourgeoisie?
Surely it's likely that some such people exist and they are better off deciding ethics by gut instinct. I'd even say "you should use gut instinct" should be the null hypothesis for any skill that humans can learn as children. Catch a ball by gut instinct. Next try to catch one by solving the differential equation governing its motion. Which way worked better?
Whether we are better off one way or another is a more interesting question.
With most skills the gut-instinct strategy starts to fail at scale. You might be able to build a cathedral by gut instinct but you might just end up with a lot of crushed stonemasons. For a skyscraper it's best to figure out the differential-equation strategy before even starting. That's fine. We get a few experts to learn the equations and they tell the steelworkers and masons what to do.
But ethics is a bit of a special case: "have a few experts who tell everybody else what to do" is a giant principal-agent problem, itself an ethical vulnerability. We try to decide all our most important ethical problems by democratic vote with nearly universal suffrage now. Does that mean everybody has to be brought up to speed if we want to be able to consistently handle any moral problems too far from what our gut instinct is prepared for?
Can we bring everybody up to speed? What precisely do we teach them? Preference utilitarianism is the closest thing we have to a mathematical model here (if we can get past issues like how utility functions are equivalent under affine transformation but aggregated utility functions are not...). But naive utilitarianism seems to be somewhere in between the "assume a spherical cow" and the "bumblebees can't fly!" levels of modeling, and more sophisticated versions don't seem to be at a level where they can safely ignore or even just canonically tractably reconstruct useful deontological and/or virtue ethics. From the goat's point of view, making curried goat is much worse than ... er... making "stuffed goat"; sure. But the person making curried goat might be a decent choice of babysitter for your (human) kids, and the other is not, and that's a matter of actual risk rather than of low-decoupler confusion.
Worse: ethical problems like these might not have a single context-free stable solution. Imagine nearly all the world become vegetarian for the next 200 years, and then your great-etc-grandkids' babysitter wants to feed them some curried goat. Naive utilitarianism says this still kills the same fraction of a goat that it would in today's world, but any sort of virtue ethics says that this time the parents should get their kids out of the house of that unstable individual ASAP.
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