Unless I’m missing something, using different scales doesn’t actually affect utilitarian calculations. For the question to be coherent, there has to be a conversion between positive and negative utility. Now, in this formulation of the problem, there’s no obvious natural conversion between fun and pain, but any monotonic conversion function that we choose to adopt will lead to well-defined tradeoffs and thus a well-defined utilitarianism. Some functions would end up looking rather silly, but presumably we’re smart enough not to use those.
Interestingly, of the major act utilitarianisms that I’m aware of, this problem only seems to arise at all in pleasure/pain utilitarianism; negative utilitarianism doesn’t admit to the existence of an exchange rate for torture (which seems rather shaky in light of preferences similar to your own), while preference utilitarianism carries a natural conversion methodology.
Unless I’m missing something, using different scales doesn’t actually affect utilitarian calculations. For the question to be coherent, there has to be a conversion between positive and negative utility. Now, in this formulation of the problem, there’s no obvious natural conversion between fun and pain, but any monotonic conversion function that we choose to adopt will lead to well-defined tradeoffs and thus a well-defined utilitarianism. Some functions would end up looking rather silly, but presumably we’re smart enough not to use those.
Interestingly, of the major act utilitarianisms that I’m aware of, this problem only seems to arise at all in pleasure/pain utilitarianism; negative utilitarianism doesn’t admit to the existence of an exchange rate for torture (which seems rather shaky in light of preferences similar to your own), while preference utilitarianism carries a natural conversion methodology.