I have a lot of opinions about ethics, and they tend to be different from other people’s. One question that often comes up in conversations, therefore, is “if I do such-and-such, am I a bad person?” or “is X unethical?”
In my experience, there are a couple things that this can mean. One of them is, “does your moral framework say that X is bad?” For utilitarians like myself, there’s not really a concept of “bad” actions and “good” actions per se, only actions that increase or decrease utility by whatever amount. So the actual translation of this question is “does action X maximize utility over the space of all possible actions?” or, if you want a finer-grained answer, “how far away is X from maximizing utility?”
Of course, on this perspective, since almost all actions do not maximize utility, most things people (including myself) do are “unethical” or “not perfectly ethical”.
Another thing that people can mean is “does X make me a Bad Person?” Now, I’m a moral anti-realist, so Bad Person is just a label that I can choose to apply to people. So the utilitarian translation of this question is “would it increase utility for me to implicitly threaten to call you a Bad Person if you take action X?” Calling people Bad People is a fairly powerful social tool for getting them to do what I think is correct, but it requires that they (or their friends) take my Bad Person label seriously. So I need to choose the policy about how to apply my Bad Person label that optimizes expected utility.
It turns out that this doesn’t involve labeling someone a Bad Person every time they do something non-utilitarian does not maximize utility, for hopefully obvious reasons. Instead, a better policy seems to be something like: if you do something really egregiously non-optimizing, like become a totalitarian dictator, I’ll call you a Bad Person. If you make altruism-hedonism tradeoffs that lie pretty much within the Overton window of socially-acceptable things to say/do, I won’t call you a Bad Person, but I also won’t think you’re particularly good/awesome/exciting/interesting. If you look like you’re actually making a good-faith effort to maximize utility I will be extremely impressed and think you are excellent and awesome.