Eliezer: Why does anything have a utility at all? Let us suppose there are some things to which we attribute an intrinsic utility, negative or positive - those are our moral absolutes - and that there are others which only have a derivative utility, deriving from the intrinsic utility of some of their consequences. This is certainly one way to get incommensurables. If pain has intrinsic disutility and inconvenience does not, then no finite quantity of inconvenience can by itself trump the imperative of minimizing pain. But if the inconvenience might give rise to consequences with intrinsic disutility, that's different.