Ah! You're assuming you have the moral obligation with or without the knowledge.
No, I take the moral obligation away entirely. For the USC, this will generally result in universes systematically becoming lukewarm universes. (Happy universes become downgraded since it saves money, unhappy universes become upgraded since it costs the company nothing, the incentive for the search being fueled by money-saving approaches, and I'm assuming a preference by the searchers for more happiness in the universes all else being equal.)
A law which required universal "Happiness" would just result in USC going bankrupt, and all the universes being turned off, once USC started losing more money than they could make. A law which required all universes -discovered- to be less than Happy to be made into Happy universes just results in company policy prohibiting looking in the first place.
So in your original example, both the rich man aware of misery and the rich man ignorant of it have no moral obligation?
If that's what you mean, I would describe the old system as "punishing knowledge" rather than "rewarding ignorance" since the baseline under your new system is like lack of knowledge under the old system.
I also suspect not many people would agree with this system.
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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