This conclusion, which is entailed by any plausible non-negative[1] total utilitarian view, is that a world of tremendous happiness with absolutely no suffering is worse than a world of many beings each experiencing just slightly more happiness than those in the first, but along with tremendous agony.
It seems to me that you’re kind of rigging this thought experiment when you define an amount of happiness that’s greater than an amount of suffering, but you describe the happiness as “slight” and the suffering as “tremendous”, even though the former is larger than the latter.
I don’t call the happiness itself “slight,” I call it “slightly more” than the suffering (edit: and also just slightly more than the happiness per person in world A). I acknowledge the happiness is tremendous. But it comes along with just barely less tremendous suffering. If that’s not morally compelling to you, fine, but really the point is that there appears (to me at least) to be quite a strong moral distinction between 1,000,001 happiness minus 1,000,000 suffering, and 1 happiness.
It seems to me that you’re kind of rigging this thought experiment when you define an amount of happiness that’s greater than an amount of suffering, but you describe the happiness as “slight” and the suffering as “tremendous”, even though the former is larger than the latter.
I don’t call the happiness itself “slight,” I call it “slightly more” than the suffering (edit: and also just slightly more than the happiness per person in world A). I acknowledge the happiness is tremendous. But it comes along with just barely less tremendous suffering. If that’s not morally compelling to you, fine, but really the point is that there appears (to me at least) to be quite a strong moral distinction between 1,000,001 happiness minus 1,000,000 suffering, and 1 happiness.