Some Theological Musings Courtesy of Auggie

I read today in Augustine's Confessions: Book Three, Chapter 7, Paragraph 12 that "evil was nothing but a privation of good (that, indeed, it has no being)."

Would I be correct to understand Auggie to say that evil is the absence of good, like cold is the absence of heat, and like darkness is the absence of light?

If so, (and I think so), then is good/evil measurable across a continuum of 0 to infinity (like heat or light), instead of measurable as a binary function of 0 (evil) or 1 (good)?

How is this approach different to the Ultilitarian's view, in which one tries to express goodness as a mathematical function that can be operated on by calculus to determine the maximization of goodness.

(As an aside, I know that Man really screws up utilitarianism, but what about if God used utilitarianism? Hmm...Is this an underlying assumption of the Free Will Defense or at least in Plantinga's undercutting defeater of Mackie?)