I’m utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively
In this context, ‘people’ typically refers to a being with moral weight. What we know about morality comes from our intuitions mostly, and we have an intuitive concept ‘person’ which counts in some way morally. (Not necessarily a human, sentient aliens probably count as ‘people’, perhaps even dolphins.) Defining an arbitrary being which does not correspond to this intuitive concept needs to be flagged as such, as a warning that our intuitions are not directly applicable here.
Anyway, I get that you are basically trying to make a utility function with revenge. This is certainly possible, but having negative utility functions is a particularly bad way to do it.
I was putting an upper bound on (what I thought at the time as) how negative the utility vector dot product would have to be for me to actually desire them to be unhappy. As to the last part, I am reconsidering this as possibly generally inefficient.
You said this:
In this context, ‘people’ typically refers to a being with moral weight. What we know about morality comes from our intuitions mostly, and we have an intuitive concept ‘person’ which counts in some way morally. (Not necessarily a human, sentient aliens probably count as ‘people’, perhaps even dolphins.) Defining an arbitrary being which does not correspond to this intuitive concept needs to be flagged as such, as a warning that our intuitions are not directly applicable here.
Anyway, I get that you are basically trying to make a utility function with revenge. This is certainly possible, but having negative utility functions is a particularly bad way to do it.
I was putting an upper bound on (what I thought at the time as) how negative the utility vector dot product would have to be for me to actually desire them to be unhappy. As to the last part, I am reconsidering this as possibly generally inefficient.