Consider trade-offs between suffering of medium and extreme severity, where medium severity could be described as hurtful or disabling. It seems hard to defend that no duration of medium suffering could ever outweigh a short duration of extreme suffering. This is not a matter of downplaying the extreme suffering for its short duration, but rather of appreciating the magnitude of an eternity of medium suffering. (I think the idea of eternity really helps in imagining what is at stake when one assumes lexicality.)
It also seems a priori implausible that having any particular experience could somehow reveal information about it being lexically superior to other experiences. Experiencing extreme suffering can tell us that its quality is extremely bad, but this insight is duration-insensitive. Filling the entire universe with people experiencing medium suffering forever seems to be decidedly worse than a single person experiencing extreme suffering for a few hours.
So if one deems medium suffering offsetable by pleasure, then extreme suffering will be offsetable as well, assuming transitivity.
Consider trade-offs between suffering of medium and extreme severity, where medium severity could be described as hurtful or disabling. It seems hard to defend that no duration of medium suffering could ever outweigh a short duration of extreme suffering. This is not a matter of downplaying the extreme suffering for its short duration, but rather of appreciating the magnitude of an eternity of medium suffering. (I think the idea of eternity really helps in imagining what is at stake when one assumes lexicality.)
It also seems a priori implausible that having any particular experience could somehow reveal information about it being lexically superior to other experiences. Experiencing extreme suffering can tell us that its quality is extremely bad, but this insight is duration-insensitive. Filling the entire universe with people experiencing medium suffering forever seems to be decidedly worse than a single person experiencing extreme suffering for a few hours.
So if one deems medium suffering offsetable by pleasure, then extreme suffering will be offsetable as well, assuming transitivity.