Comment by coldtea

That's one take. A counter argument is that utilitarian calculus is highly subjective, individually and socio-culturally, resulting in movements like Social Darwinism, Eugenics movement, etc. And someone like Musk might even argue the ethics of identity politics and contemporary social justice movements are fundamentally similar to those earlier examples, relying on a present day calculus (whether nominally utilitarian or otherwise) that in time, if not already, will prove no less backward, unempathetic, and harmful. Kantian ethics is one attempt to restrain that kind of unconscious, self-serving discretion.

You can go back and forth, poste, riposte, ad nauseum. Abstract ethical philosophy and discourse are their own kind of tarpit, in some ways worse than the rhetoric behind the modern culture wars. To avoid getting drawn into them--the tarpits, if not the philosophies themselves--it pays to know how to identify them and how they interact.