Crudely, something like this: Divide the value-laden world up into individuals and into short time-slices. Rate the happiness of each individual in each time-slice on a scale from -1 to +1. (So we suppose there are limits to momentary intensity of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, which seems reasonable to me.) Now, let h be a tiny positive number, and assign overall utility 1/h tanh(sum of atanh(h * local utility)). Because h is extremely small, for modest lifespans and numbers of agents this is very close to net utility = sum of local utility. But we never get |overall utility| > 1/h. Now, this feels like an ad hoc trick rather than a principled description of how we "should" value things, and I am not seriously proposing it as what anyone's utility function "should" (or does) look like. But I think one could make something of a case for an agent that works more like this: just add up local utilities linearly, but weight the utility for agent A in timeslice T in a way that decreases exponentially (with small constant) with the description-length of (A,T), where the way in which we describe things is inevitably somewhat referenced to ourselves. So it's pretty easy to say "me, now" and not that much harder to say "my wife, an hour from now", so these two are weighted similarly; but you need a longer description to specify a person and time much further away, and if you have 3^^^3 people then you're going to get weights about as small as 1/3^^^3.