i was wondering because i was thinking it might be efficient to try and convince people to be utilitarian and it would be interesting to know how you guys and girls came to be utilitarians,

personally one day i wrote down "make happiness, stop suffering" and then sometime later "make the most happiness and stop the most suffering" and then i thought about this and efficency and charities and factory farming and stuff and then sometime later i googled "make the most happiness and stop the most suffering" and the second result i got just said "utilitarianism" and i read about and realised it was a word for what i was!:D! which is part of the reason i think maybe it would be a great idea to publicise it more, if i hadnt found that page and discovered i was a utilitarian and read about what other utilitarians thought is important i would probably be thinking totally about poverty and factory farming and never think of wild animals or any futuristic ideas.

so what about ye?:) philosophy graduates, vegetarians?:)

I don't remember ever really not being a utilitarian. When I first learned of the term, my reaction was "Is there another code of ethics?" The best I can come up with is when I started to care about actually living that way, rather than settling for not being perfect. it happened around the time I read through the lists of fallacies and paradoxes on Wikipedia, I suspect because of that. It helped me stop trusting my intuition and start trusting reason. I knew intellectually what I should do (reason). I just didn't want to (intuition).

I first heard of the term from reading about Warhammer 40k. Specifically, the Tau are utilitarian.

At about 16, I realised that happiness and suffering were all that mattered in the world. That was independent of any philosophical education.

I learnt about utilitarianism later, when I read Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. My entry into philosophy was through Peter Singer and Daniel Dennett. I was led to them by reading about science and by watching debates about religion.

Last of all, I've started to change my behaviour, including becoming vegetarian, eating little animal products altogether and donating a little to charity.

I don't remember thinking formally about ethics before 21 (when I became an atheist and began experimenting with many different world views and ideas). I remember being 15 or 16 and resenting the idea of teaching 'ethics' in universities because I didn't consider it to be an academic issue. It seemed obvious to me that to be ethical was simply to be loving and kind, it wasn't an intellectual concern.

Before 23, if you asked me on what basis I considered an action to be morally right or wrong, I would have said that an action was wrong if it either caused suffering or violated someone's preference (on some level, hedonism has always made some sense to me but the latter is how I rationalized why it is wrong to kill someone in their sleep, not to mention acts of 'disrespect' or 'disloyalty' which aren't necessarily harmful, it only occurred to me later that hedonism can justify opposing killing someone in their sleep on the grounds that it would prevent happiness). I became a vegan when I was 22, mostly on the basis of hedonistic rationale (ie. sentience being the only morally relevant criterion). Around 21 or 22, I argued that empathy was, or should be, the basis of morality and my views then were similar to my views now (since I argued that empathy, which is 'in feeling', concerns itself with happiness and suffering) but I also justified a virtue ethics like position on things like adultery or gossiping which may not cause suffering but most people believe are disrespectful, thus unloving, thus unempathetic if empathy is a form of love.

At 23, I was actually reading a thread online about adultery (which I had always strongly disapproved of and it would probably still be out of character for me to cheat on someone if I was in a relationship with them) and one of the posters said something like "you can't want to know your partner is cheating on you because you'd have to know to want to know" or something that made me come to that conclusion, only what you experience has any relevance to you, so before I knew what philosophical hedonism was or who Jeremy Bentham was, I became an ethical hedonist, arguing that actions are only good or bad on the basis that they maximize happiness/minimize suffering. I wasn't really a value hedonist at this point, I didn't really argue that pleasure was the only intrinsic good until around June/July of 2010 even though that would logically lead to ethical hedonism and vice versa.

At this point I wasn't a consistent hedonistic-consequentialist, I don't think my views became fully consistent until around May or June (when I abandoned the idea that intentions have any moral value, as far as the rightness or wrongness of actual decisions is concerned). I flirted with aggregation from around Oct. 2010 to March of this year, I think. For a while I was a negative utilitarian until I came across a good argument for pleasure/pain being symmetrical in value. I also flirted with altruism (as opposed to agent neutral consequentialism), as a means of avoiding some of the implications of aggregative utilitarianism but rejected it in March when I rejected the idea of aggregation. I'm probably missing something or remembering incorrectly, it's interesting to think about how much your views can change over the years.

I don't consider myself to be a utilitarian, though, and I'm not interested in promoting it even if I privately think agent-neutral hedonistic consequentialism is the correct ethical theory. There's no point in promoting something that few people will ever practice consistently, imo, or practice at all, for that matter. If you asked me, I would just say I considered myself to be a pan-Africanist which might be off-topic since it's not an ethical theory. Sorry for going on.