I once pitted half the regular users here against a whole other forum in a ferocious, thread-spanning argument. You won't take that away from me.
I want to get it off my chest, but there are genuinely dangerous thoughts in this world and this is one of them (if telling you didn't break the forum rules, it should).
However, I think I can make an analogy. There's a more moderate type of utilitarian who rejects 'greatest total happiness' in favor of 'greater total happy people'. In other words, the amount of happiness itself isn't a variable; it's just about bringing as many people as possible to a good state of mind. That type is likely to create the kind of results Owen was thinking of.
The other type is the utilitarian who measures the happiness each person experiences and adds it all up without regard for the person. His goal is to maximize the number of those precious, precious utils. Thus, it is possible for a widespread but extremely mild cause of disutility (such as, say, annoyance at snoring across an entire population) to outweigh all the utility of a single person.
So here's the scenario: one day, a special child is born. He is immortal, able to heal from all injury within seconds. As the years pass he becomes a great and mighty hero, beloved of the kingdom's peasantry. However, the king has a vision sent by the gods - the hero is really the product of a curse, and as long as he lives, there will be a slightly higher incidence of snoring across the whole of the kingdom. The only way to negate the curse is to subject the hero to horrific pain. The king knows his duty, for how can the suffering of a single person outweigh the needs of the many? He orders the hero imprisoned beneath his palace, to be tortured for all eternity.
That's not strictly analogous to what the guy said (it was a lot worse than this little yarn, and as I said, not entirely theoretical), but it goes by the same principle.
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What other options do you have?
Why are scientists so bad at naming planets? 
