Aggregation and Two Moral Methods

Utilitas

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-23

  Kamm, F M ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85008540078     PISSN: 09538208     EISSN: 17416183     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0953820804001372     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (23)

1. 1 I am grateful for discussion of my cases here to Michael Otsuka.
2. ‘Who Is Wronged?’, The Oxford Review 5 (1967), p. 16.)
3. (‘The Choice between People, Common Sense Morality, and Doctors’, Bioethics 1 (1987), p. 255)
4. Morality, Mortality, vol. 1 (New York, 1993).
5. What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
6. ‘Equal Treatment and Equal Chances’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 14 (1985), p. 177
7. then in Morality, Mortality, vol. 1.
8. 6 US English for ‘blinker’ is ‘blinder’.
9. ‘Scanlon and the Claims of the Many versus the One’, Analysis 60 (2000), p. 288.
10. ‘Scanlon and the Claims of the Many’, p. 288.
11. 10 Though, of course, it does not give A all the satisfaction of A’s concern that saving him would have given him. It also does not give to the fact that A’s concern would not be as well satisfied when B survives as when he does the recognition that giving equal chance does. Thus, a premiss in these arguments caters even less to the subjective perspective of each person than a procedure that refuses to toss a coin between A’s leg and B’s life. As noted above, rejecting a fair toss between A’s leg and B’s life is not quite enough to generate a commitment to the further impartial perspective of the Tiebreaker and Balancing arguments.
12. 11 I shall have reason to modify this claim below.
13. 12 A view that I discussed at length in Morality, Mortality, vol. 1.
14. 13 Notice that it is not clear that whenever lives are at stake, we should not break ties with a minor concern such as a sore throat. For suppose there are a billion (or more if necessary for argumentative purposes) individuals on a billion separate islands waiting to be saved and we can save only one, and one of them is someone whose sore throat would also be cured. Here each person has only a very small chance of being saved. It might be that the loss to him of a one-in-a-billion chance can be outweighed by saving someone and also curing someone else’s sore throat.
15. 14 As Michael Otsuka emphasized to me.
16. 15 In ‘Rediscovering Reasons’ (unpublished), and in ‘Justifiability to Each Person’, Ratio 16 (2003), p. 368.
17. ‘Owing, Justifying, and Rejecting’, Mind 111 (2002), p. 323.
18. 17 I argued for the greater moral value of distributed rather than concentrated benefits in Morality, Mortality, vol. 1.
19. 18 The Method of Virtual Divisibility can also mislead if one mistakenly thinks that A in our example will actually get at least twelve years of life regardless of our decision about whether to give him or C eight additional years. This is not true.
20. ‘Skepticism about Saving the Greater Number’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2004), p. 413.
21. 20 Using the Method of Virtual Divisibility that I discussed above, we could imagine that each of the working limbs that would be present in the single person, when compared with two limbs in one of the three, would not tie with or dominate the two limbs. (Suppose one thinks the difference between getting two limbs and getting one is not significant enough to interfere with a tie between them, and so we should toss a coin. Then one could create another example, perhaps using years of life, where each one year in a candidate who will live thirty years is to be compared via virtual divisibility with twenty years in each of thirty other candidates that could be got instead. It is harder to say there is a tie between one year and twenty.)
22. 21 Otsuka notes that Scanlon faces the same problem even though he thinks numbers do count, for he would respond to Otsuka’s two cases in the same way as the anti-numbers theorist given that he considers both baseline and benefit to create a tie.
23. What We Owe to Each Other, University College, London, June 2004.