I agree with John.  There are many, many problems with the standard utilitarian account (which is why most academics have altered it to make it more coherent and palatable).

1)There is always an epistemology problem of determining whether your actions will actually maximize pleasure.  You just don't and can't know.

2) It's fairly clear that the good isn't pleasure in any standard way.  I can always ask, "Is this pleasure I am receiving good?"  Me asking that question demonstrates that, at least at a conceptual/linguistic level, we differentiate between pleasure and goodness.  

3) There are countless ways for the average person to make utilitarian sacrifices, but do not.  Is your hypothetical atheist, who is glad to sacrifice for the greater good, giving up all non-essential income to charity?  Is he vegan? Is he saving little sweatshop hands by abstaining from laptops and smartphones and tablets and video games?

4) suffering is essentially a relative phenomena, meaning it's power or force is relative to the one experiencing it (the entire rationale for both Buddhism and Stoicism is that suffering can be completely gotten rid of through your own mental fortitude). Going through suffering makes us stronger, and causes us to actually suffer less in the future. For example, imagine I jostle into two people in a crowd, one of these people is a pompous Hollywood actor, the other is a Holocaust survivor.  Whose day is more likely to be ruined from a mild jostling?  Utilitarianism can't incorporate this, because to do so one must acknowledge the pedagogical usefulness of suffering.

5) We have specific duties to specific people that over-ride a generic desire for maximal pleasure.  If my wife is drowning on one side of the pool, but two other people's wives are drowning on the other side, I am not hesitating to save my own wife.  Nor would I deny that a world with two dead wives is less full of pleasure than a world in which only my wife died.  But she's MY

I grew up in a rather fundamentalist (but still very liturgical) Protestant church that I had more or less fallen away from by the time I went to College.  When I started taking philosophy classes I read a lot of philosophers who endorsed some sort of Classical Theism--Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St. Thomas...  I found things like Platonism and Thomism and Vedanta to be well argued and intellectual positions compared to the literalist interpretations of the Bible I had grown up with, and in particular I found classical theism a much more convincing picture of the Divine than Theistic Personalism.  The more I read Ed's blog and various arguments I found that even if I wasn't a dedicated classical theist, the arguments for a classical theist God were a lot stronger and more worthy of consideration that many people and scholars would have you believe.

seigneur wrote:

I'm not so obsessed as to watch it live, but I will probably see all the reviews, analyses, and comments on the games on youtube rather sooner than later.

You think Caruana has a chance?

RomanJoe wrote:

I've been meaning to set up an online blog to help my thinking. Do you prefer pen and paper over a keyboard?

I like pen and paper because I'm often not in front of a computer.  Those little pocket size Moleskin notebooks that come in packs of 3 are convenient.  Just keep one in your breast pocket or by your wallet and it's always at hand. 

My notebook is like a disorganized chronicle, but often if theres' an idea I'm really working at or trying to understand I'll write longer stuff on my computer.  Much easier to edit and expand upon.

Using both allows you to 1) remember every passing thought or idea (or quote you read) worth saving and 2) develop/hone ideas that you find worth really exploring.

UGADawg wrote:

It's not necessarily, it depends on the metaethics, normative ethics, etc one presupposes.

Among professors, you're right.  But the average American would have trouble pronouncing 'metaethics', let alone hold a coherent set of metaethical beliefs.