Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Toby Ord has written a criticism of several forms of negative utilitarianism, including what he calls Lexical Threshold NU (which he attributes to David Pearce), which sounds like what you might be thinking of.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Toby Ord has written a criticism of several forms of negative utilitarianism, including what he calls Lexical Threshold NU (which he attributes to David Pearce), which sounds like what you might be thinking of.