I think I was unclear to a certain extent. So to make amends I’m going to make things even more vague and complicated (you can thank me later).

It’s true I don’t consider myself either a utilitarian or an intuitionist, by the common definitions of those terms. But to a certain extent you can’t be a human being without being an intuitionist—your moral values, whatever the logical merits or demerits, are inevitably based on arational factors. It can only be “rational” for you to amass wealth if you value wealth. If you’re an ascetic then spending your time making money and pampering yourself with luxuries is, given your basic prelogical values and assumptions, irrational. Values lie in our instincts and intuitions. A base value cannot be “irrational” in the same way as a number cannot be illogical. Irrationality arises at higher stages where an actor is determining *how* to realize those values. 4 is no more or less logical than 5 in and of itself: it just *is*. However, 2+2 is a highly illogical way to get to 5—it gets you to 4 instead. Whether 2+2 is rational or not depends on whether or not you want to get to 4. So, rationalism applied to economics or sociology (the sciences of human action) is inevitably based on a form of intuitionism: desires are the axioms from which human action proceeds(1).

It’s not so much that intuitionism makes debate impossible (since everyone is an intuitionist in reality), it’s that intuitionists with radically different basic values and assumptions aren’t going to get anywhere in a debate. I don’t know enough about you to know whether your own values are radically different than mine.

Utilitarianism is based on a form of intuitionism; no argument, no matter how logical, is going to win over anyone who doesn’t even *care* about “overall happiness” in the first place. You might be able to convince someone that “overall happiness” is beneficial to them given their other values and desires, but you’re not going to get such individuals to sacrifice their *own* happiness for other people’s, because their care for “overall happiness” flows logically from their care for their own happiness, rather than vice versa, so they’ll ditch it if it doesn’t serve the logical purpose they thought it did.

I made the distinction between right and permissible because “right” can be used to mean positive obligations, which I don’t believe in. And I don’t believe anything is “right” or “wrong” in any objective sense. I agree with Radyn to an extent that “society” determines what is and is not permissible, except I think that view is methodologically flawed, because “society” is a concept in people’s heads, and thus cannot itself think or act. Only individuals can act (in concert with other individuals or not). A given individual determines what is “right” or “wrong” according to his own arational valuations and what logically follows from them.

I think my moral views can be objectively determined to be beneficial to certain people; i.e., nonaggressors, people who do not violate the categorical imperative. They are highly detrimental to people who *do*, however. Which brings me to the fact that any set of morals is utilitarian in nature, it’s just that we all determine “utility” differently. I realize and admit that there is no objective standard by which nonaggressors can be determined to be ‘good’ and aggressors ‘bad’, but that’s a problem you’re going to run into no matter what values you hold, because values are inescapably subjective. Where I break with moral skeptics, however, is their belief that this is actually important and that morals are meaningless. One’s morals have an effect on one’s actions, so morals are highly relevant to human action (as is “society”, even though it doesn’t exist in reality). I take my morals very seriously and judge others by them, and feel no shame in doing so. Just as I take no shame in judging food or music by how it conforms to my tastes.

So here’s a way to put it for you: Epistemologically I’m a radically skeptical intuitive rationalist, ethically I’m a subjective absolutist, politically I’m an authoritarian anarchist.

I hold that all these labels are not as self-contradictory as they sound.

One more thing on consequentialism and intentions: it’s not exactly clear where an action ends and its consequences begin. For example, “shooting someone” can be treated as an action, but in reality, speaking very technically, it’s not. You’ve merely pulled a trigger on a gun, and the bullet flies as a consequence of that action. So I’m going to readily admit that morals can’t be perfectly derived by logic. Logic is extremely useful to moral debate, but only given certain common ground.

* By "rationalist in the Austrian tradition" I mean praxeologist. I favor the methodology of the Austrian School of economics because it is extremely holistic and serves just as well for sociology broadly as for economics traditionally defined.

** Of course the matter of a fact does not determine its rightness. That's not what I said: Hume's strawman naturalist would have to logically conclude that act of murder is "right" just because it happened (i.e. it "ought" to have happened because it "did"). Hume's "you can't derive an ought from an is" was never a relevant critique of moralism. An action is right or wrong, in and itself (by my standards), based on how it conforms to my moral values: I don't much concern myself with people's "intentions" if they do things I consider immoral.

(1) You could always go with biological reductionism, but reductionism is more a feelgood manipulation device for scientistic eggheads than a serious methodology. Its remarkable lack of serious or original insight is almost beyond my ability to parody.

This was very good, and also very articulate, if that's the right word. Here's what I think: An action is moral if it increases the net amount of happiness in the world without taking happiness away from those who already have it (i.e. if Bob had a million dollars, I couldn't steal it and give half to a friend, even though that would make more people happy). But that's just what I think

Permissible implies that society has determined an action to be legally/morally allowable, ie, you won't get stoned for it. What's permissible isn't necesarily what's "right", and vice versa, because what's "right" is subject to the individual's own morality, while society determines what's "permissible".
Other closing points:
Kant is a ** to read.
Why does everyone always cite Hitler in these morality debates? Throughout the course of history, there have been plenty other megalomaniacal, genocidal tyrants.
There is no system that "works." Morality isn't something like the Third Law of Motion or something quantifiable. Morality is something created by man, and may be changed by man.

Utilitarianism is useless because overall happiness is a concept that can’t really be quantified. You can only imagine how happy or unhappy *you* would be as other people, but this doesn’t take into account the complex dynamics of competing preferences, personal relationships, and differing arational values by which individuals subjectively evaluate what makes them “happy”. You’re you, not the human race, you can only know what makes you happy.

“We can rarely guarantee to predict accurately every consequence of our actions.”

Which alone makes consequentialism a more or less worthless standard of moral evaluation. Consequences can never be accurately evaluated because sometimes they stretch far into the future. And then there’s always Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy: it’s impossible to know what the consequences of other courses of action would have been, so it can’t be said that what happened was the best or worst possible thing that could have happened. Then there’s the fact that consequences involve, among other things, how other people act in response to your actions, something you don’t have any control over yourself.

“Even if we could be reasonably certain that all the immediate effects of our pulling a child out from in front of a bus would be positive, if this child turns out to be Hitler we have in fact (according to classical utilitarianism) done a terrible wrong.”

This assumes Hitler as a child is predestined to be a mass murderer.

“For example, a man in soviet Russia married to a political dissident would (according to Kant) be wrong to lie to the police about his wife's whereabouts, as this would suggest he was willing that lying become common practice.”

Since the Soviets consistently showed an unwillingness to respect ANYONE’S rights to autonomy, no-one was obligated to respect theirs. Lying to (and killing) bad people is easily something I’d like to see universalized. “Saving innocent lives” is irrelevant to the matter, it’d be just as moral to lie to a soviet if he was asking where the nearest restroom was, or if he was looking for a doctor to patch up his buddy’s gunshot wound.

“There seem to be no major theories which show how to combine a concern for both consequences and intentions.”

And neither can be objectively quantified in any meaningful way.

Actions are moral or not in and of themselves, intentions don’t matter in the real world and consequences can’t be accurately measured.

“Intuitionism ignores the fact that people frequently suffer from moral dilemmas, when what is right is not clear at all.”

There is nothing that is ‘right’, there are only things that are permissible and things that are not.

And no, I'm not an intuitionist. I'm a rationalist in the Austrian tradition.