It doesn't work if you continuously increase the the severity of the minor inconvenience/reduce the severity of torture and try to find where the two become qualitatively comparable, as pointed out in this reply. The only way I see it work is to assign zero disutility to specks (I advocated it originally to be at the noise level). Then I thought that it is possible to have the argument work reasonably well even with a non-zero disutility, but at this point I don't see how.
Utility(world) = e^-(# of specks) + X*e^-(# of people getting tortured), where X is some constant larger than 1/(1-1/e) in the incommensurate case, and less than that in the commensurate limit.
Of course, this assumes some stuff about the number of people getting tortured / specked already - but that can be handled with a simple offset.
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