Clearing up my meta-ethical confusion regarding utilitarianism. From The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism":

Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility.

Realizing that the expression of any set of values must inherently "sum to 1" was quite an abrupt and obviously-true-in-retrospect revelation.