There is a considerable body of considered thought on this area, and instead of waxing abstract about utilitarian calculus in philosophy 101 terms, I suggest consulting the work of suffering-focused ethicists, such as David Pearce, Magnus Vinding, Jonathan Leighton, Brian Tomasik, etc. The good folks at Qualia Research Institute are also trying to figure out the ground facts about this all. The nature of valence is an open question, and how any sort of utilitarian ethics will play out depends on the actual details of what value actually is, as an objective feature of reality.
I personally have found negative utilitarianism an oddly cheery ethics. After all, even the faintest hint of any despair or horror at existence is, ceteris paribus, not something that negative utilitarianism would recommend! (Negative utilitarianism might indeed be a self-limiting meme, in that in many cases the prudent negative utilitarian choice is to adopt some more psychologically adaptive explicit ethical system, and there is a strong case for not proselytizing, given the psychological harm these ideas can do at least in unsophisticated form.)
I’m a “gun-to-my-head” negative utilitarian—that is, if I’m pressed, or in case of situations and scenarios where my ordinary pragmatic parsing falls apart, if Omega asks me, so to speak, that’s what I’d recommend. The alternatives are just too ghastly to contemplate. Here I think most of us are simply extremely deluded about how truly bad bad experiences can be; if we had any glimpse of a shadow of a vague idea of just how horrible extreme suffering can be, we’d all be frantically flailing about for the infamous “off button” on reality… On this topic, see: https://qualiacomputing.com/2019/08/10/logarithmic-scales-of-pleasure-and-pain-rating-ranking-and-comparing-peak-experiences-suggest-the-existence-of-long-tails-for-bliss-and-suffering/
There is a considerable body of considered thought on this area, and instead of waxing abstract about utilitarian calculus in philosophy 101 terms, I suggest consulting the work of suffering-focused ethicists, such as David Pearce, Magnus Vinding, Jonathan Leighton, Brian Tomasik, etc. The good folks at Qualia Research Institute are also trying to figure out the ground facts about this all. The nature of valence is an open question, and how any sort of utilitarian ethics will play out depends on the actual details of what value actually is, as an objective feature of reality.
I personally have found negative utilitarianism an oddly cheery ethics. After all, even the faintest hint of any despair or horror at existence is, ceteris paribus, not something that negative utilitarianism would recommend! (Negative utilitarianism might indeed be a self-limiting meme, in that in many cases the prudent negative utilitarian choice is to adopt some more psychologically adaptive explicit ethical system, and there is a strong case for not proselytizing, given the psychological harm these ideas can do at least in unsophisticated form.)