Your example exposes the flaw in the “destroy everything instantly and painlessly” pseudo-solution: the latter assumes that life is more suffering than pleasure. (Euthanasia is only performed—or argued for, anyway—when the gain from continuing to live is believed to be outweighed by the suffering.)
I think this shows that there needs to be a term for pleasure/enjoyment in the formula...
...or perhaps a concept or word which equates to either suffering and pleasure depending on signage (+/-), and then we can simply say that we’re trying to maximize that term—where the exact aggregation function has yet to be determined, but we know it has a positive slope.
The classic one is euthanasia.
Your example exposes the flaw in the “destroy everything instantly and painlessly” pseudo-solution: the latter assumes that life is more suffering than pleasure. (Euthanasia is only performed—or argued for, anyway—when the gain from continuing to live is believed to be outweighed by the suffering.)
I think this shows that there needs to be a term for pleasure/enjoyment in the formula...
...or perhaps a concept or word which equates to either suffering and pleasure depending on signage (+/-), and then we can simply say that we’re trying to maximize that term—where the exact aggregation function has yet to be determined, but we know it has a positive slope.