But daaad, this now becomes a multi-objective optimization problem, and there are potentially an infinite number of solutions that lie along the Pareto frontier...
Anyway, well, then, that seems to leave some big question marks. How is everyone who goes through utilitarian moral reasoning supposed to decide between help and neglect, and hope to come up with the same answer? (Because if two people come up with sufficiently different answers, it may lead to one or both concluding that the expected utility of violently enforcing obedience from the other person is worth the cost, unless they have deontological rules of some sort. Like the kind that the article says Mill supported.)
If someone is vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons, it's because they want there to be fewer factory farms. This would of course mean that the animals they would have eaten wouldn't exist at all, so of course they'd consider nonexistence better than a life of torture.
"I'd rather you not have lived at all, rather than live a life of torture" is a pretty mainstream opinion in general, I think.
Unless cloning counts? Is extinction okay as long as we have some copies of their DNA and plan to clone them into a decent life eventually? I feel rather uneasy about that resolution; at the very least I'd want to see a species successfully reconstructed in this manner before giving the possibility moral weight.
Having robots makes Felix really happy. Not as happy as having slaves, but still happier than anyone else could ever be.
In more old-school convex optimization the closest thing is probably insufficiently constrained problems. If you don't say the amount of each food you eat has to be greater than zero, you can get all your dietary needs satisfied for the low low price of minus infinity dollars!
From another perspective, though, perhaps there's a "No True Scotsman" side of this. Is a utility monster a sign of a badly-specified problem, or are they a definitive sign of one? If the former, it stands to reason it's not a "concern" for modellers -- it's a dream!
For example, the special "Felix" case ignores the case where said guy is stuck by gamma radiation and dies. Over time, the probability of that k or a bunch of other catastrophes ruinning the solution tends to 1.
Therefore, the best solution avoids the most known catastrophes and is updated as new possibilities of those are found. (Tontine lotto, anyone?) Minimax loss optimal. Maximin (maximizing gain without increasing base loss) could be decent as well. Deciding between the two is better left to wizards.
Online stochastic optimization is mathematical black magic anyway so far.
But then, satisfying humans is much easier given all the built in biases we have. Keeping things alive long term is much harder.
[1]https://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/d1/teaching/ws1...
Does the millionth lucky penny feel as special as the first? If you gave Jeff Bezos a million $ would he even notice, let alone feel happier.
I feel that most happiness is gained from being able to feed and house your family, not having your children die from disease. Anything much beyond that is a rounding error and based on standards of the day.
Didn't you just describe North Korea?
I feel like Pareto efficiency only comes into the picture if the quantities are actually clear, but I don't understand how to make that concrete in ethical (not economic) terms.
The "rule" of "quality" seems like it can easily be abused by whoever is in power in the given situation. E.g. an assertion such as this could be valid: it's okay for police to shoot "innocent" people if "they were disturbing the peace".
Are quality and quantity both vulnerable to being gamed?
the frontier is the points in space where neither can be further optimized without impacting the other.