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I suspect I'm more confused than even this implies. I don't think there's any numerical ethical standing measurement, and I think that cross-universe comparisons are incoherent. Ethics is solely and simply about decisions - which future state, conditional on current choice, is preferable.
I'm not trying to compare a current world with poverty against a counterfactual current world without - that's completely irrelevant and unhelpful. In a world with experienced pain (including some forms of poverty), an agent is ethically superior if it makes decisions that alleviate such pain, and ethically inferior if it fails to do so.
From my perspective, we have a word for that, and it isn't ethics. It's preference. Ethics are the rules governing how preference conflicts are mediated.
Then imagine somebody living an upper-class life who is unaware of suffering. Are they ethically inferior because they haven't made decisions... (read more)