One way of thinking about this would be in relation to self-reported life satisfaction.
Consider someone who rates their life satisfaction at 1⁄10, citing extreme hunger. Now suppose you give a certain amount of food to bring them up to 2⁄10. You have essentially reduced suffering by 1 unit.
Now consider someone who rates their satisfaction at 10⁄10, believing that their life could not be any better. Then consider that you do something for them (e.g. you give them a wonderful present) and they realise that their life is even better than before and retrospectively think they have actually increased from 9⁄10 to 10⁄10. We might say that happiness has been increased by one unit (I take this ‘retrospection’ approach to try to avoid that I might also be ‘reducing suffering’ here by implying there was no suffering at all to begin with—not sure if it really works, or if it’s actually necessary).
If someone finds it more important to bring the person to 2⁄10 from 1⁄10 than it is to bring the other person to 10⁄10 from 9⁄10 one might be weighting removing a unit of suffering as more important than creating a unit of happiness.
But how would I know that we were comparing the same ‘amount of change’ in these cases?
What makes going from 1⁄10 to 2⁄10 constitute “one unit” and going from 9⁄10 to 10⁄10 as also “one unit”?
And if these are not the same ‘unit’ then how do I know that the person who finds the first movement more valuable ‘cares about suffering more’? Instead it might be that a 1-2 movement is just “a larger quantity” than a 9-10 movement.
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!
One way of thinking about this would be in relation to self-reported life satisfaction.
Consider someone who rates their life satisfaction at 1⁄10, citing extreme hunger. Now suppose you give a certain amount of food to bring them up to 2⁄10. You have essentially reduced suffering by 1 unit.
Now consider someone who rates their satisfaction at 10⁄10, believing that their life could not be any better. Then consider that you do something for them (e.g. you give them a wonderful present) and they realise that their life is even better than before and retrospectively think they have actually increased from 9⁄10 to 10⁄10. We might say that happiness has been increased by one unit (I take this ‘retrospection’ approach to try to avoid that I might also be ‘reducing suffering’ here by implying there was no suffering at all to begin with—not sure if it really works, or if it’s actually necessary).
If someone finds it more important to bring the person to 2⁄10 from 1⁄10 than it is to bring the other person to 10⁄10 from 9⁄10 one might be weighting removing a unit of suffering as more important than creating a unit of happiness.
But how would I know that we were comparing the same ‘amount of change’ in these cases?
What makes going from 1⁄10 to 2⁄10 constitute “one unit” and going from 9⁄10 to 10⁄10 as also “one unit”?
And if these are not the same ‘unit’ then how do I know that the person who finds the first movement more valuable ‘cares about suffering more’? Instead it might be that a 1-2 movement is just “a larger quantity” than a 9-10 movement.
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!