I don’t see what the problem is. Utilitarianism says that there is, or ought to be, some objective utility function, the maximization of which is what determines “good” and “evil”. This function need not be a linear combination of people’s personal utility functions, it can be “well-being” as you describe, but this doesn’t make it fundamentally different from other utility functions, it’s simply a set of preferences (even if nobody in real life actually has these preferences in this precise order). Theoretically, if someone did posess this as their actual utility function they would be a perfectly good person, and if we knew exactly how to formulate it we could describe people’s goodness or evilness based on how well their personal utility function aligned with this one.
What you’ve defined above is just morality in general: basically any moral theory can be expressed as a “nonlinear” function of some properties of individuals plus some properties of the world. For example, in deontology one nonlinearity is the fact that murdering someone is nearly-infinitely bad.
The key thing that utilitarianism does is claim that the function we should be maximising is roughly linear in well-being; my main point is clarifying that it shouldn’t be linear in “utility” (in either a desire or an economic sense).
I don’t see what the problem is. Utilitarianism says that there is, or ought to be, some objective utility function, the maximization of which is what determines “good” and “evil”. This function need not be a linear combination of people’s personal utility functions, it can be “well-being” as you describe, but this doesn’t make it fundamentally different from other utility functions, it’s simply a set of preferences (even if nobody in real life actually has these preferences in this precise order). Theoretically, if someone did posess this as their actual utility function they would be a perfectly good person, and if we knew exactly how to formulate it we could describe people’s goodness or evilness based on how well their personal utility function aligned with this one.
What you’ve defined above is just morality in general: basically any moral theory can be expressed as a “nonlinear” function of some properties of individuals plus some properties of the world. For example, in deontology one nonlinearity is the fact that murdering someone is nearly-infinitely bad.
The key thing that utilitarianism does is claim that the function we should be maximising is roughly linear in well-being; my main point is clarifying that it shouldn’t be linear in “utility” (in either a desire or an economic sense).