Well, right at the start, I said we could assign numbers that maintain preference rankings. Here I was trying to establish a meaningful scale, though. A numbering in which the sizes of the steps actually meant something.

"on the same scale"? I first need to explicitly specify what the heck that actually means. I'm doing this partly because when I've looked at some arguments, I'd basically go "but wait! what if...? and what about...? And you're just plain assuming that..." etc. So I'm trying to fill in all those gaps.

Further, ultimately what I'm trying to appeal to is not a blob of arbitrary axioms, but the notion of "don't automatically lose" plus some intuitive notions of "reasonableness"

Obviously, I'm being far less clear than I should be. Sorry about that.