Utilitarian/Ethical Hedonist Tropers...UNITE!

I can't come up with plans to maximize happiness alone!

This is a thing now? Okay!

I consider myself an ethical hedonist.

Count me in.

I'm glad that I'm not alone :D

Does anybody have any good recommendations for fiction with prominent Utilitarian/Ethical Hedonist characters/events? I've enjoyed interpreting Attack on Titan's Erwin and Hange to fit my moral view (I've written a sad amount of fanfic just about this) so I was wondering if you guys know anything that I could really get into like that.

For anybody who hasn't seen this, I'm gonna bump this up. So...yeah...

-bump-

I thought this thread sank to the bottom of the covens lol. The best place I can think of for examples is For Happiness.

I thought it had too. Though to be fair, I only bumped it because it was hopeless where it was.

And I've checked the For Happiness page more times than I'd like to admit, same with The Needs of the Many. I like the examples there, I was just wondering if anyone found any more examples. :P

I have a complicated relationship with utilitarianism, because while I like the basic premise I think that the logical extremes of the concept—"Hey, let's torture a guy for fifty years so a million people don't get dust in their eyes!"—are deeply disturbing. So I guess I'm best described as an ethical hedonist, and to that end a libertarian socialist.

Also a bit of a nihilist, if I'm being completely honest with myself, but that's neither here nor there.

I think there needs to some caveat to utilitarianism that puts different qualities to different kinds of suffering/joys. No amount of people with dust in their eyes justify torture because those are of different qualities that quantity cannot make up for. Ever.

True, though universal statements are still tricky, for example, say that the man being tortured doesn't really mind for whatever reason and that some of the people with dust in their eyes are incredibly bothered by it. It all depends on what makes the individual happy.