Is 10,000 people suffering identically equal bad as one of them?

[Yahadreas]

The terms used to compare the two cases are value judgements, and value judgements can be both individual or social (or familial, or cultural, or traditional, and so on). When we make claims like "X is better than Y", there's always (and has to be) an implicit qualification: "X is better than Y according to this standard (my opinion / society's opinion / this observable consequence / etc.). Whether or not 10,000 people suffering is worse than 1 person suffering depends entirely on which qualification is implied. For society? Yes it is. For the individual in the latter case? Hell no. It would be a misunderstanding of language to think that value judgements like this are unconditional (categorical).