In practice you would have to make an assumption that people generally report on the same scale. There is some evidence from happiness research that this is the case (I think) but I’m not sure where this has got to.
From your original question I thought you were essentially trying to understand, in theory, what weighting one unit of pain as greater than one unit of pleasure might mean. As per my example above, one could prioritise a one unit change on a self-reported scale if the change occurs at a lower position on the scale (assuming different respondents are using the same scale).
Another perspective is that one could consider two changes that are the same in “intensity”, but one involves alleviating suffering (giving some food to a starving person) and one involves making someone happier (giving someone a gift) - and then prioritising giving someone the food. For these two actions to be the same in intensity, you can’t be giving all that much food to the starving person because it will generally be easy to alleviate a large amount of suffering with a ‘small’ amount of food, but relatively difficult to increase happiness of someone who isn’t suffering much, even with an expensive gift.
Not sure if I’m answering your questions at all but still interesting to think through!
In practice you would have to make an assumption that people generally report on the same scale. There is some evidence from happiness research that this is the case (I think) but I’m not sure where this has got to.
From your original question I thought you were essentially trying to understand, in theory, what weighting one unit of pain as greater than one unit of pleasure might mean. As per my example above, one could prioritise a one unit change on a self-reported scale if the change occurs at a lower position on the scale (assuming different respondents are using the same scale).
Another perspective is that one could consider two changes that are the same in “intensity”, but one involves alleviating suffering (giving some food to a starving person) and one involves making someone happier (giving someone a gift) - and then prioritising giving someone the food. For these two actions to be the same in intensity, you can’t be giving all that much food to the starving person because it will generally be easy to alleviate a large amount of suffering with a ‘small’ amount of food, but relatively difficult to increase happiness of someone who isn’t suffering much, even with an expensive gift.
Not sure if I’m answering your questions at all but still interesting to think through!