http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-6
Alt text
Deontologists of course WANT to eat you, but aren’t allowed.
Bonus panel
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And this kind of thing is why I think it makes more sense to define utility in a way analogous to how the Kelvin scale defines temperature, such that negative values are impossible and more desirable outcomes are just considered more positive than undesirable ones.
But this doesn’t fix the issue of net utility. If the utility of me eating you is greater than the utility of your existing (if such things could ever be measured!) then we still end up in the situation in the strip, even if the scores are both positive. Just as the room you’re in could be -10K relative to the room I’m in
That actually matches with how most people view things though. The utility of eating anyone is going to be extremely small, especially compared to the opportunity cost of a person’s life, so the only time you’re going to get that situation is when someone can be expected to cause so much harm to others in the future as to outweigh their own life, such as, for example, how someone who kills someone that’s attempting to commit mass-murder is usually considered justified in doing so, or if you’re in trolley-problem scenario where saving multiple other people necessarily requires the death of one person.
Setting the scale to not have negative values in a non-relative sense is just to prevent issues like it becoming a good thing to kill sufficiently unhappy people, even if they object and there’s no danger to anyone else averted by doing so.
