I'm more than happy to grant that people use an intuitive form of utilitarian judgment as a heuristic aid in decision-making. That's quite far from claiming, as the original article does, that utilitarianism can form an "ultimate ethical theory," or that conscious valence solves the "is/ought" problem in moral reasoning.

The fact is, the vast majority of the decisions that people make in their day-to-day lives don't really involve any reasoning at all, ethical or otherwise.

As an ethical theory, utilitarianism is, at best, a limited lens through which we can examine certain very simplified, highly circumscribed decisions, for points at which we have (or think we have) a far clearer understanding of the most likely consequences of an action than we do in normal circumstances.

This is why, I think, utilitarians seem to like thought experiments so much: it's much easier to formulate a utilitarian reasoning chain to decide dramatic imaginary scenarios than it is to apply it to normal daily behavioral decisions. Utilitarianism might be able to figure out whether it would be ethical to choose to annihilate the human race in nuclear fire, but it has a lot less to say about whether I should tell my kid to stop picking his nose.