[paytonjjones]

Yes that's a very good point.

Even people who say they are deontologists often slip back into utilitarian arguments when they're not careful — for example, when arguing Kant's categorical imperative against lying, they slip into talking about the local benefits vs. overall harms.

The real gap, as you've said, is more about overconfidence in one's utilitarian calculus for distal vs. proximal moral outcomes. An average Joe is likely to give a lot more weight to the moral outcomes that rely on local information and affect his friends and family. The characterization of an "EA" — whether fair or not — is that they're much more likely to use a lot more explicit moral calculus and attempt to correct for proximal vs. distal biases.

In a way its very similar to Sowell's arguments about the informational economics of a distributed market vs. a central planner.