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Desrtopa comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) - Less Wrong
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Choosing a world where everything is the same except that one person is a bit happier suggests a preference for more happiness than there currently is, all else being equal. It doesn't even remotely suggest a preference for happiness maximizing at any cost.
I would prefer to this one a world where everything is exactly the same except I have a bit more ice cream in my freezer than I currently do, but I don't want the universe tiled with ice cream.
So you would prefer a world where everyone is maximally happy all the time but otherwise nothing is different?
Just like, making the ridiculous assumption that the marginal utility of more ice cream was constant, you would prefer a universe tiled with ice cream as long as it didn't get in the way of anything else or use resources important for anything else?
I think this has way too many consequences to frame meaningfully as "but nothing otherwise is different." Kind of like "everything is exactly the same except the polarity of gravity is reversed." I can't judge how much utility to assign to a world where everyone is maximally happy all the time but the world is otherwise just like ours, because I can't even make sense of the notion.
If you assign constant marginal utility to increases in ice cream and assume that ice cream can be increased indefinitely while keeping everything else constant, then of course you can increase utility by continuing to add more ice cream, simply as a matter of basic math. But I would say that not only is it not a meaningful proposition, it's not really illustrative of anything in particular save for how not to use mathematical models.