I find negative utilitarianism unappealing for roughly the same reason I'd find "we should only care about disgust" or "we should only care about the taste of bananas" unappealing. Or if you think suffering is much closer to a natural kind than disgust, then supply some other mental (or physical!) state that seems more natural-kind-ish to you.

"Only suffering ultimately matters" and "only the taste of bananas ultimately matters" share the virtue of simplicity, but they otherwise run into the same difficulty, which is just that they don't exhaustively describe all the things I enjoy or want or prefer. I don't think my rejection of bananatarianism has to be any more complicated than that.

Something I wrote last year in response to a tangentially related paper:

I personally care about things other than suffering. What are negative utilitarians saying about that?

Are they saying that they don't care about things like friendship, good food, joy, catharsis, adventure, learning new things, falling in love, etc., except as mechanisms for avoiding suffering? Are they saying that I'm deluded about having preferences like those? Are they saying that I should try to change my preferences — and if so, why? Are they saying that my preferences are fine in my personal decision-making as an individual, but shouldn't get any weight in an idealized negotiation about what humanity as a group should do (ignoring any weight my preferences get from non-NU views that might in fact warrant a place at the bargaining table for more foundational or practical reasons distinct from the NU ideal) — and if so, why?

[...] "It's wrong to ever base any decision whatsoever on my (or anyone else's) enjoyment of anything whatsoever in life, except insofar as that enjoyment has downstream effects on other things" is an incredibly, amazingly strong claim. And it's important in this context that you're actually making that incredibly strong claim: more mild "negative-leaning" utilitarianisms (which probably shouldn't be associated with NU, given how stark the difference is) don't have to deal with the version of the world destruction argument I think x-risk people tend to be concerned about, which is not 'in some scenarios, careful weighing of the costs and benefits can justify killing lots of people' but rather 'any offsets or alternatives to building misaligned resource-hungry AGI (without suffering subsystems) get literally zero weight, if you're sufficiently confident that that's what you're building; there's no need to even consider them; they aren't even a feather on the scale'. I just don't see why the not-even-a-feather-on-the-scale view deserves any more attention or respect than, e.g., divine-command theory; in an argument between the "negative-leaning" utilitarian and the real negative utilitarian, I don't think the NU gets any good hits in.

(Simplicity is a virtue, but not when it's of the "I'm going to attempt to disregard every consideration in all of my actions going forward except the expected amount of deliciousness in the future" or "... except the expected amount of lying in the future" variety; so simplicity on its own doesn't raise the view to the level of having non-negligible probability compared to negative-learning U.)

Negative Utilitarianism