But if you could be assured in advance that there were almost certainly nothing you could do about it, then if it were up to you to choose whether or not to worry, I think it would be better to choose not to.
I'm not sure I'm parsing you correctly here. Are you talking about the negative utility he gets from ... the sensation of getting negative utility from things? So, all things being equal (which they never are) ...
Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
That would imply that it was some sort of meta-negative utility, if I'm understanding you correctly. But if you're asking if I endorse self modifying to give up a value given near certainty of it being a lost cause, the answer is yes.
There's a recent science fiction story that I can't recall the name of, in which the narrator is traveling somewhere via plane, and the security check includes a brain scan for deviance. The narrator is a pedophile. Everyone who sees the results of the scan is horrified--not that he's a pedophile, but that his particular brain abnormality is easily fixed, so that means he's chosen to remain a pedophile. He's closely monitored, so he'll never be able to act on those desires, but he keeps them anyway, because that's part of who he is.
What would you do in his place?
In the language of good old-fashioned AI, his pedophilia is a goal or a terminal value. "Fixing" him means changing or erasing that value. People here sometimes say that a rational agent should never change its terminal values. (If one goal is unobtainable, the agent will simply not pursue that goal.) Why, then, can we imagine the man being tempted to do so? Would it be a failure of rationality?
If the answer is that one terminal value can rationally set a goal to change another terminal value, then either