“Utility”, as Eliezer says, is the thing that is maximized, not happiness. As I pointed out before, a utility function need not be defined over persons or timeslices of persons (before aggregation or averaging); its domain could be 4D histories of the entire universe, or other large structures. In fact, since you are not indifferent between any two distributons of what you call “utility” with the same total and the same average, your actual preferences must have this form. This makes questions of “distribution of utility across people” into type errors.
Average utilitarianism is actually a common position.
“Utility”, as Eliezer says, is the thing that is maximized, not happiness. As I pointed out before, a utility function need not be defined over persons or timeslices of persons (before aggregation or averaging); its domain could be 4D histories of the entire universe, or other large structures. In fact, since you are not indifferent between any two distributons of what you call “utility” with the same total and the same average, your actual preferences must have this form. This makes questions of “distribution of utility across people” into type errors.