As a person who is trying to practice utilitarianism, I often get into some variant of this problem:
1. Let's say I convinced John to be an utilitarian
2. John has produced 100 more units of happiness during his life than he would have produced without me convincing him.

How many units of happiness did I produced by convincing John? I do not think it is 100, because then both of us would think that we produced that 100 units of happiness, but there is only 100 units produced, not 200. So maybe thinking, that I produced 100 units would lead to bias towards indirect consequences when evaluating which action is more important to do.

I don't think I am the first one to think about this. Does this problem has a name or something?

I think this paradox will be easier to understand if you use paperclips instead of units of happiness.

Let's say you have a machine that produces paperclips. You run it long enough to produce paperclips. How many paperclips did you produce? If you produced 100 paperclips, and the machine produced 100 paperclips, then that adds to 200 paperclips, but only 100 have been produced. Does saying you each produced 100 paperclips lead to bias towards indirect consequences?

I see two good ways to look at this.

One: You each produced 100 paperclips. This does not add. When considering an action, you take the one that results in you producing the most paperclips. If the machine is sufficiently advanced, it might consider different actions and do what results in it producing the most paperclips. These two decision processes are independent, and you only need to concern yourself with the number of paperclips produced.

Two: 100 paperclips are produced. Don't worry about ownership or responsibility. You take the action that results in the most paperclips, regardless of who produces them. This version can cause some difficulty when considering that billions of paperclips are produced a year, so your decision amounts to the order of one part in a hundred million. It has an advantage in dealing with things like Newcomb's paradox. It's hard to justify claiming ownership of paperclips that were created (or not) before you even made a decision. It's much easier to just claim that they exist.

I did not respond for a long time, because I was undecided, whether that solves the problem. But now I think it does, now I will think in terms of variant two. Thank you very much