Plus your idea is even more vulnerable to utility monsters than utilitarianism since it only requires people with moderate unusual or nosy preferences ...snip...
That might be what you imagine "my" idea to involve, but it isn't.
There is a perfectly sensible, rational way to determine if people's supposed hurt feelings impose actual costs: ask them to pay to ameliorate them. Dislike watching gay folks kiss? Pay them not to. (I dislike watching anybody kiss - that's just me - but not enough to be prepared to pay to reduce the incidence of public displays of affection).
What's that? There are folks who are genuinely harmed, but don't have the budget to pay for amelioration? That's too bad - and it's certainly not a basis for permitting the creation of (or continued existence of) an entity whose purposes have - always and everywhere - been captured and perverted, and ruined every economic system in history.
And not for nothin'... it's all fine and dandy to blithely declare that "high powered people cannot necessarily step lightly" as if that disposes of 500 years worth of academic literature criticising the theoretical basis for the State: at this point in time no State is raining death on your neighbourhood (but yours is probably using your taxes - plus debt written in your name - to rain death on others).
Let's by all means have a discussion on the idea that the non-initiation of force is 'unworkable' - that's the same line of reasoning that declared that without the Church holding a monopoly to furnish moral guidance, we would all descend to amoral barbarism. These days churches are voluntary (and Popes still live in palaces) - and violent crime is on a secular downtrend that has lasted the best part of a century. And so it will be when the State goes away.
Are you really saying that an action can be recognized as moral or immoral depending on whether other people are willing to pay money to stop it, or am I grossly misunderstanding you?
That would mean that the hiring of thugs to beat up other people who engage in e.g. "sinful behavior" would serve as proof (not just evidence, but effective proof) that person doing the hiring is on the moral side, just because they're willing to pay money to so beat such people up.
Your description of morality is becoming more and more incoherent.
(This is a semi-serious introduction to the metaethics sequence. You may find it useful, but don't take it too seriously.)
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into a whale. Is this awesome?
"Maybe? I guess it would be pretty cool to be a whale for a day. But only if I can turn back, and if I stay human inside and so on. Also, that's not a whale.
"Actually, a whale seems kind of specific, and I'd be suprised if that was the best thing the wizard can do. Can I have something else? Eternal happiness maybe?"
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into orgasmium, doomed to spend the rest of eternity experiencing pure happiness. Is this awesome?
...
"Kindof... That's pretty lame actually. On second thought I'd rather be the whale; at least that way I could explore the ocean for a while.
"Let's try again. Wizard: maximize awesomeness."
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned himself into a superintelligent god, and is squeezing as much awesomeness out of the universe as it could possibly support. This may include whales and starships and parties and jupiter brains and friendship, but only if they are awesome enough. Is this awesome?
...
"Well, yes, that is awesome."
What we just did there is called Applied Ethics. Applied ethics is about what is awesome and what is not. Parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales are awesome. ~666 children dying of hunger every hour is not.
(There is also normative ethics, which is about how to decide if something is awesome, and metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out. I'll tell you right now that those terms are not on the exam.)
"Wait a minute!" you cry, "What is this awesomeness stuff? I thought ethics was about what is good and right."
I'm glad you asked. I think "awesomeness" is what we should be talking about when we talk about morality. Why do I think this?
"Awesome" is not a philosophical landmine. If someone encounters the word "right", all sorts of bad philosophy and connotations send them spinning off into the void. "Awesome", on the other hand, has no philosophical respectability, hence no philosophical baggage.
"Awesome" is vague enough to capture all your moral intuition by the well-known mechanisms behind fake utility functions, and meaningless enough that this is no problem. If you think "happiness" is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.
If you do manage to actually implement "awesomeness" as a maximization criteria, the results will be actually good. That is, "awesome" already refers to the same things "good" is supposed to refer to.
"Awesome" does not refer to anything else. You think you can just redefine words, but you can't, and this causes all sorts of trouble for people who overload "happiness", "utility", etc.
You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover. Instead it brings to mind concrete things like starship-whale math-parties and not-starving children, which is what we want anyways. You are already enabled to take joy in the merely awesome.
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist. "Is this awesome?" engages you to think of the value of a possible world, as opposed to "Is this right?" which engages to to think of virtues and rules. (Those things can be awesome sometimes, though.)
I find that the above is true about me, and is nearly all I need to know about morality. It handily inoculates against the usual confusions, and sets me in the right direction to make my life and the world more awesome. It may work for you too.
I would append the additional facts that if you wrote it out, the dynamic procedure to compute awesomeness would be hellishly complex, and that right now, it is only implicitly encoded in human brains, and no where else. Also, if the great procedure to compute awesomeness is not preserved, the future will not be awesome. Period.
Also, it's important to note that what you think of as awesome can be changed by considering things from different angles and being exposed to different arguments. That is, the procedure to compute awesomeness is dynamic and created already in motion.
If we still insist on being confused, or if we're just curious, or if we need to actually build a wizard to turn the universe into an awesome place (though we can leave that to the experts), then we can see the metaethics sequence for the full argument, details, and finer points. I think the best post (and the one to read if only one) is joy in the merely good.