There are two problems.
In the first scenario, in which ethics is an obligation (i/e, your ethical standing decreases for not fulfilling ethical obligations), you're ethically a worse person in a world with poverty, because there are ethical obligations you cannot meet. The idea of ethical standing being independent of your personal activities is, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.
In the second scenario, in which ethics are additive (you're not a worse person for not doing good, but instead, the good you do adds to some sort of ethical "score"), your ethical standing is limited by how horrible the world you are in is - that is, the most ethical people can only exist in worlds in which suffering is sufficiently frequent that they can constantly act to avert it. The idea of ethical standing being dependent upon other people's suffering is also, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.
It's not a matter of which world you'd prefer to live in, it's a matter of how the world you live in changes your ethical standing.
ETA: Although the "additive" model of ethics, come to think of it, solves the theodicy problem. Why is there evil? Because otherwise people couldn't be good.
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.
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