It's truly amazing the contortions many people have gone through rather than appear to endorse torture. I see many attempts to redefine the question, categorical answers that basically ignore the scalar, and what Eliezer called "motivated continuation".

One type of dodge in particular caught my attention. Paul Gowder phrased it most clearly, so I'll use his text for reference:

...depends on the following three claims:

a) you can unproblematically aggregate pleasure and pain across time, space, and individuality,

"Unproblematically" vastly overstates what is required here. The question doesn't require unproblematic aggregation; any slight tendency of aggregation will do just fine. We could stipulate that pain aggregates as the hundredth root of N and the question would still have the same answer. That is an insanely modest assumption, ie that it takes 2^100 people having a dust mote before we can be sure there is twice as much suffering as for one person having a dust mote.

"b" is actually inapplicable to the stated question and it's "a" again anyways - just add "type" or "mode" to the second conjunction in "a".

c) it is a moral fact that we ought to select the world with more pleasure and less pain.

I see only three possibilities for challenging this, none of which affects the question at hand.

• Favor a desideratum that roughly aligns with "pleasure" but not quite, such as "health". Not a problem.
• Focus on some special situation where paining others is arguably desirable, such as deterrence, "negative reinforcement", or retributive justice. ISTM that's already been idealized away in the question formulation.
• Just don't care about others' utility, eg Rand-style selfishness.