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I see the problem. I wonder if anyone had already delved and tried formalizing using ordinal numbers. Would be an interesting read, I definitely would need to think about this more.
You mentioned that if you assign any negative value of inconvenience to hiccups, you inadvertently fix a real number that can be compared to the negative value of morally incomparable situations, and normalized by an amount of people, where obviously no matter how many people you take, hiccups aren't going to amount to horrible deaths or things of the sort.
Have you considered using mathematical ordinals instead of real numbers? I remember that you mentioned them at some point in one of your articles, schematically, if we assign the number ω or above to actual horrible events and regular real numbers to minor inconveniences, they can be compared where still you won't be able to get a finite amount of minor inconveniences that will amount to one truly horrible event.
EDIT:
Real numbers are not defined as ordinals (at least not directly in a way I'm familiar with), but still work the same, you can take natural numbers as well and they are well defined as ordinals and use them instead, but if I'm allowed to be informal I'd rather just keep the idea of real numbers or rational numbers since I don't see how it really matters.