Out of random here...are you talking about physical pain (as in torture, no food, sanitary etc) or mental/emotional pain like a family member dying. If it were the latter, I think it's that one person should experience it.
Any pain without physical damage. I am discounting insignificant damages like harm induced by stress.
Morality is too complex and subjective to be measured quantitatively.
Do you consider pain to be the same way?
I'd like to clarify that I'm not trying to classify moral acts into objective or universal terms, just relative terms on a subjective moral scale. Kinda like an indifference curve in economics. It's subjective, but can be compared (in >, <, and = forms) to other subjective morals.
if you can theoretically divide it amongst as many people as possible then I would say spread it was wide and thin as possible, after so many divisions it will no longer be considered pain, therefore no suffering will come from it, therefore it is moral.
I am inclined to agree. Does this imply that steps toward this end are also moral to some degree?
I think you should include time in there too.
I feel that up to a certain amount of pain it would be morally better to have it divided over 1000 people, where the limit is that I think that at some point you just hit a pain maximum and it doesn't matter if you get more pain above that point, so if you already reached that point it's morally better to put it on one person.
Interesting.
Presuming that there is a maximum amount of pain that can be perceived by a person (in a fixed amount of time), both extreme ends of the spectrum appear to potential be more moral than the middle.
This time element also begs the question, does some fixed amount of pain become better or worse when it spread out over time to insignificant discomfort, or shortened to an instant of agony?