so my best yardsticks are intuition and a vague idea of … estimates
Um. Intuition is often used as a fancy word for “I ain’t got no arguments but I got an opinion”. Effectively you are talking about your n=1 personal likes and dislikes. This is fine, but I don’t know why do you want to generalize on that basis.
It seems to me that clearly the hungerless, food-need-less person ought to be better off and obtain higher values on their utility function, ceteris paribus.
Let’s extend that line of imagination a bit further. It seems to me that this leads to a claim that the less needs and desires you have, the more “optimal” you will be in the sense of obtaining “higher values on [the] utility function”. In the end someone with no needs or desires at all will score the highest utility.
Um. Intuition is often used as a fancy word for “I ain’t got no arguments but I got an opinion”. Effectively you are talking about your n=1 personal likes and dislikes. This is fine, but I don’t know why do you want to generalize on that basis.
Let’s extend that line of imagination a bit further. It seems to me that this leads to a claim that the less needs and desires you have, the more “optimal” you will be in the sense of obtaining “higher values on [the] utility function”. In the end someone with no needs or desires at all will score the highest utility.
That doesn’t look reasonable to me.