Value receptacles and regret: How to be a decent utilitarian

This post should be interesting for utilitarians, but I suspect that the criticisms and responses have application elsewhere also.

Here are two objections to utilitarianism:

First, utilitarians can make no sense of regret. They claim that one should always maximise the balance of pleasure over pain. But that means that one never has competing reasons: for we only have one reason to begin with.

Second, utilitarians value people only as receptacles of value. They value people only as means of maximising the overall good.

Here is a theory that seems to me to avoid both objections:

(1) For each possible pleasure for each possible individual, you have reason to realise it. For each possible pain for each possible individual, you have reason to prevent it.

(2) Each reason's strength is correlated with the intensity of the pleasure or pain. When reasons conflict, resolve conflicts by prioritising overall weight.

Regret is certainly possible now. For the original objection was that we had a theory that consisted of only one reason, and so reasons could never conflict. But this new theory certainly allows for conflict. (1) tells us that we have many reasons, and they will certainly conflict. Obviously, (2) tells us how to resolve conflicts, but that is not the same as saying that conflicts do not occur.

The value-receptacle claim also falls apart. (1) and (2) don't even mention the overall good, let alone treat individuals as means to it. I can't state that strongly enough: It seems to me that the value-receptacle criticism rests on a very crude understanding of what utilitarians say. The claims about overall goodness are not meant to be claims about some independent entity which individuals happen to have an effect on.

It may be the fault of some advocates of utilitarianism that these objections seem cogent in the first place. If utilitarianism is the theory that we only have reason to maximise the overall good, then these criticisms may succeed. And perhaps some utilitarians have phrased it this way. But I'm more charitably inclined to think that they describe it this way for brevity. The idea that there is some universal good to which we all contribute is possibly extensionally equivalent to, and is more succinct to state than, the two part theory I suggested above. That is probably why some describe utilitarianism in this manner. But I do not think that we should take this way of describing it too seriously.

But perhaps these criticisms can be made good, or I have said something silly. Comments, as always, are welcome.