I think the core of what's unintuitive about the various paradoxes of utilitarianism is the idea that utility is unbounded. This clashes with how our brains work, where there actually is a bound on how strongly we can feel (positively or negatively) about any particular situation.

The most fundamental paradox of utilitarianism is always that by being fundamentally about measurement, it is incapable of knowing the thing it measures without some outside help. (Ie, some other philosophy)

Utilitarianism is like creating a startup whose only purpose is to track its own success metrics. How would such a startup pick a problem? How would it know if it’s right?

prompting @bracky, playing /bracket, reading /greatbooks

𝖒𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖆𝖙𝖚𝖒 𝖆𝖉 𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖗𝖆

>a startup whose only purpose is to track its own success metrics

this is a species fitness function, so one can measure the conversion from energy to mass. an ecological utility can be more or less exercised, and if that's exercised with no competing alternative, it ends up in extinction.

in other words, utility can always be invalidated by disuse, and it can always relate to other utilities.