I think 'barely worth living' is universally applicable. Anyone's life can be seen as 'barely worth living' by sufficiently advanced spoiled child. E.g. we would see all cavemen's lives as 'barely worth living' all while those guys say, ohh the hunting been great this year.

Reading your comment (and others in this vein) and realizing that the RC isn't as bad as I'd thought it was, and therefore doesn't show human morals to be so inconsistent as I'd thought them to be, makes me update towards human morals in general maybe not being so inconsistent at all. (At least within an individual; not so much between cultures.)

Yes, I had thought about setting the zero of the function to be summed across individuals to a higher level than “just barely good enough for them not to want to die”. The problem with that is that then there would be people who don't want to die but still have a negative utility, and even a total utilitarian would conclude they had better die (at least in “dry water” models when you neglect the grief of their friends and family, and the cessation of the externalities of their life).

Edit: It looks like “dry water” has acquired a meaning totally unrelated to the one I had in mind. (It was the derogatory term John von Neumann used to refer to models of fluids without viscosity, whose proprieties are very different from those of real fluids.)

What Parfit postulates should be called, to avoid equivocation, "A life barely worth celebrating" - it's good news and you say "Yay!" but very softly. I'd even argue that this should be a universal standard for all discussions of the Repugnant Conclusion.

Excellent point. I'll try to remember to do that if I end up discussing this again.