Cursed Immortality

Barbossa steps into moonlight and reveals the skeletal crew: they cannot die, but food turns to ash, drink cannot quench thirst, and they feel neither wind, sea spray, nor human touch.

‘Keep the person alive’ is a crisp, measurable proxy for human flourishing. The curse maximizes that proxy while deleting nearly every latent value that makes continued life desirable.

The pirates did not ask an optimizer for immortality; the condition is a supernatural punishment for stealing cursed gold. The analogy deliberately abstracts away that causal detail.