Aggregation and Consequentialism

Traditional moral frameworks conflate subjective justification with objective impact, allowing harmful effects to be “washed away” by good intentions or beneficial outcomes. This paper introduces Dual-Ledger Transactionalism (DLT), a diagnostic framework that maintains separate ledgers for objective effects (beneficial/harmful impacts on all parties) and subjective verdicts (moral justifications). Drawing on concepts from W.D. Ross’s prima facie duties and Bernard Williams’s moral remainders, DLT advances a novel principle: harmful effects persist as negative residuals that generate reciprocal effects (structural blowback), regardless of (...) moral justification. Critically, DLT also recognizes that beneficial effects persist as enduring structural facts alongside negative residuals, creating permanent structural changes to reality. Unlike utilitarianism, which permits net calculations to erase negatives, DLT conserves both beneficial and harmful effects on separate ledgers, explaining persistent guilt after “necessary evils” while also acknowledging lasting positive impact. Through analysis of cases like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas and the “Nazi at the door” dilemma, this paper demonstrates how DLT resolves explanatory gaps in existing moral theory while offering practical guidance: minimize negative residuals and their reciprocal effects within one’s epistemic horizon. (shrink)

This paper discusses the "numbers problem," the problem of explaining why you should save more people rather than fewer when forced to choose. Existing non-consequentialist approaches to the problem appeal to fairness to explain why. I argue that this is a mistake and that we can give a more satisfying answer by appealing to requirements of charity or beneficence.

Is consequentialism consistent with common-sense morality? I argue for a negative answer to this question. In Sections 1-4, I develop and defend a definition for “consequentialism.” In Section 5, I attempt to show that, given this definition, consequentialism and common-sense morality cannot be reconciled. In Section 6, I argue that, on the definition of consequentialism I defend, consequentialism should be understood, not as a view about the relationship between the deontic and the evaluative (as many philosophers suppose), but as a (...) view about the relationship between the deontic and time. (shrink)

I offer a new style of argument that supports either utilitarianism or instances of the expected equally distributed equivalent version of prioritarianism (EEDE). The central idea is that the value the welfarist assigns to a state of the world should not lie unnecessarily far from the utilities of the individuals who exist at that state. I describe various ways we might measure distance from a candidate value to the individuals' utilities, characterize a family of such measures, and explain which versions (...) of welfarism follow when we use them. For some, it's utilitarianism; for others, it's different instances of EEDE. (shrink)

This is a draft of the last chapter of my book-in-progress entitled Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends. In it, I explain how Kantsequentialism offers us important insights regarding various practical issues, including those regarding partiality, procreation, collective action, population ethics, and the aggregation of lives and limbs. It includes four main sections: (1) Promoting the Impersonal Good: Population and Procreation; (2) The Duty to Rescue: Do the Numbers Count?; (3) Love and Solidarity: Affective Partiality versus Agential Partiality; and (4) Overdetermined (...) Collective Harms: Who Are the Culprits and What Are They Culpable for? (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

According to prioritarianism, benefiting a person is more morally important, the worse off this person is. This view seems plausible: good as it is to give a large benefit to a person, it seems better to give a slightly smaller benefit to someone else who is substantially worse off. Nonetheless, I argue that it is difficult for prioritarianism to avoid giving implausibly extreme priority to the extremely worse off. It is difficult for the view to avoid the counterintuitive implication that (...) it is better to give a tiny benefit to one badly off person than to give a very large benefit to another badly off person, if the first person is sufficiently worse off than the second. I present a version of prioritarianism that avoids this implication, but it is unclear whether it can be given a plausible rationale. (shrink)

I develop a new argument against a popular family of views in ethics concerning claims aggregation: those views according to which agents ought to maximise the satisfaction of relevant claims upon their conduct. A claim is said to be relevant if it is sufficiently strong compared to those claims with which it competes. The core of the argument goes as follows. In nearly all of our decisions, we change which presently existing persons are spared severe harms such as painful and (...) premature death. In light of this fact, those who believe in maximising relevant claim satisfaction must nearly always ignore minor claims below the threshold of ‘death relevance’. This result, I suggest, is deeply implausible. In the latter half of the paper I articulate and ultimately reject five different avenues of response. (shrink)

The philosophical debate over whether procreation is morally justified, given the sufferings of procreated humans, finds renewed significance amidst global crises. In this paper, I argue that procreation as a collective human endeavour inevitably perpetuates horrendous, life-ruining evil on a global scale. I also show that horrendous evil is unavoidable even under optimistic assumptions about the prospect of the progress of civilisation. Moreover, I argue that such evil cannot be outweighed by the favourable outcomes experienced by the procreated humans. This (...) makes procreation pro tanto morally wrong. Since much of the literature focuses on individual procreative acts and non-life-ruining evil, my argument makes a novel contribution by drawing the focus of the debate to (1) humans’ collective procreative practice and (2) how it sustains horrendous evil across the globe. This analysis invites further reflection on the ethics of bringing life into a world fraught with profound suffering and encourages consideration of antinatalism as a serious philosophical proposition. (shrink)

Beneficence—the part of morality concerned with promoting people's well-being—is widely thought to be both agent-neutral and impartial: it prescribes a common aim to all, and does not favor some individuals over others. This paper explores a problem for agent-neutral, impartial beneficence from the perspective of "individualistic ethics" in the tradition of Harsanyi. The problem reveals that if we want only what is best for each of infinitely many individuals, and we are rational, then we must care about some individuals more (...) than others. I conclude that, on the individualistic approach, value must be fundamentally agent-relative. (shrink)

Six people are in trouble. We can save five of them or just the sixth. What should we do? John Taurek (1977) defends a radical view: We are not required to save the greater number. Taurek's paper has persuaded some. But even the unpersuaded agree that Taurek poses a deep and important challenge: From where does the priority of the many derive? It seems difficult, or even impossible, to convince someone who denies the importance of the numbers... to care about (...) the numbers. That’s what this paper aims to do. It will argue that the priority of the many follows, with minimal other assumptions, from something all should accept: the modest premise that if we can improve one person's chance of survival—without affecting anyone else—we should. (shrink)

Kamm’s sore throat case gives us a choice: save one life or save a distinct life and cure a sore throat. We defend the fairness explanation of the judgement that one should flip a coin to decide whom to save: it is disrespectful to let a sore throat act as a tie-breaker, because an individual would be forced to forgo a 50% fair chance of living (given to them by a coin flip), which cannot be outweighed by any number of (...) sore throats. We show that this explanation of when and why claims can permissibly break ties generates new problem cases for theories of aggregation, including theories that have been thought to accommodate the judgement that one should flip a coin in Kamm’s sore throat case. We then generalize the fairness explanation to cases involving multiple groups. (shrink)

According to Longtermism, our acts’ expected influence on the expected value of the world is mainly determined by their effects in the far future. There is, given total utilitarianism, a straightforward argument for Longtermism due to the enormous number of people that might exist in the future, but this argument does not work on person-affecting views. In this paper, we will argue that these views might also lead to Longtermism if Prudential Longtermism is true. Prudential Longtermism holds for a person (...) if and only if our acts’ overall influence on that person’s expected well-being is mainly determined by the acts’ effects in the far future. We argue that (due to a small chance of anti-ageing and uploading) there could be an enormous amount of prudential value for some contemporary person in the far future and that value may be so large that it dominates their overall expectation of lifetime well-being. (shrink)

This article reports three empirical studies regarding partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics (total N = 417). We begin by documenting the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate partial aggregation views. Thereafter, we advance the literature along two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work by ascertaining which amongst existing versions of partial aggregation (localised vs. global) chimes more fully with moral common sense. Specifically, we document how judgments about ‘irrelevant goods’ (Kamm 1993) in tie-breaking cases are just as (...) robust as the original aggregative/non-aggregative pair of judgments that constitute partial aggregation. Second, we conduct an experiment that pairs laypeople’s moral judgments in standard cases with their intuitions about the limits of permissible self-prioritisation. We investigate whether one prominent explanation of why irrelevant claims may not be aggregated (Voorhoeve’s ‘personal prerogative’ argument) can be said to underpin people’s intuitions about the (ir)relevance relation of claims in conflict cases. We close with a discussion of our findings’ import and highlight avenues for future research. (shrink)

Many species seem to have much smaller welfare ranges than we do. Which importance should we assign to the welfare of these low-welfare species when we have to decide whether to benefit members of these species or other humans? In particular, should we ever prioritize low-welfare species when some of the most significant human goods are at stake? It could be argued that benefits for low-welfare species are irrelevant to significant human benefits because they are much smaller in comparison. I (...) begin by developing this argument, but subsequently reject it based on the consideration of a hypothetical high-welfare species whose welfare range vastly exceeds the human welfare range. Arguments from empathy and fairness are given to support the opposite view on which some benefits for low-welfare species can outweigh even significant human benefits. Finally, I propose a principle that reconciles this view with the intuition that human headaches cannot outweigh human lives. (shrink)

One of the main objections to utilitarianism is the separateness of persons thesis. According to it, each person possesses a unique subjective perspective, making it impossible to aggregate the well-being of individuals. At first glance, this assertion is purely descriptive and therefore cannot justify any normative conclusions. However, it can be understood as pointing to a significant normative fact: each person has intrinsic value, and therefore their well-being should not be considered simply as part of some aggregated social good. This (...) objection was used by two of the leading Kantian moral philosophers of the 20th century, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Although they agreed in their rejection of utilitarianism, they differed on how we should treat our talents. Nozick supported the self-ownership principle, according to which each person has exclusive ownership of their talents, while Rawls proposed that the distribution of natural talents should be considered collective property. Rawls’s and Nozick’s positions on talents can be reconciled with the reciprocity principle, which requires an egalitarian distribution of the fruits of social cooperation. However, this principle leaves the interests of the disabled inadequately protected. To address this problem, a duty-sensitive self-ownership could be adopted to accommodate the natural duty to help those in need. But even such an extremely weakened form of self-ownership, if we are to consider it self-ownership at all, must prohibit paternalistic interventions. However, separateness of persons, if we associate it with the intrinsic value of human persons, must allow for some forms of paternalism, since its complete denial demonstrates our disregard for the good of others. Thus, Rawls’s position is more consistent with the idea of separateness of persons, but only if we interpret it as a rejection of self-ownership, rather than an acceptance of its more modest liberal interpretation. (shrink)

Moral aggregation, which is the combination of morally relevant features (like, for example, well-being) of different people, represented by a numerical value, is present in many contemporary moral theories. Aggregative theories define the morality of actions based on a comparison between the aggregate values of different states of affairs brought by the actions. In this paper, it’ll be argued that aggregation is undesirable for moral theories because it conflicts with important moral ideas like just distribution and the separateness of persons. (...) Not only utilitarianism, but also aggregative theories that care about distribution, such as teleological egalitarianism and prioritarianism have this problem. The suggestion, at the end, is that a moral theory basedon the notion of moral justification can deal with those problems by granting adequate importance to the separateness of persons; creating such a theory, though, involves eliminating or at least severely limiting the role moral aggregation plays in morality. The goals of the paper are arguing against moral aggregation and for a specific non-aggregative theory, moral contractualism. (shrink)

The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the universe as a whole, or the future in particular, contain infinite quantities of value and/or disvalue, then many of the theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that none of our available options are better than any other. If so, then even apparently vast effects on the far (...) future cannot in fact make the world morally better. On top of this, some strategies for avoiding this problem of “infinitarian paralysis” (e.g., exponential pure time discounting) yield views that are much less supportive of longtermism. In this chapter, we explore how the potential infinitude of the future affects the case for longtermism. We argue that (i) there are reasonable prospects for extending risk-neutral totalism and similar views to infinite contexts and (ii) many such extension strategies will still support the case for longtermism, since they imply that when we can only effect (or only predictably affect) a finite, bounded part of an infinite universe, we can ignore the unaffectable rest of the universe and reason as if the finite, affectable part were all there is. (shrink)

A person possesses value from various components of wellbeing, but they also have overall wellbeing from various instances of value taken together. Most ethicists assume that there is an objectively unique way that wellbeing from components aggregates into overall wellbeing. However, I argue that aggregation is subjective and varies depending on what sort of aggregation a person values. I end with some implications for the significance of death.

Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...) measurable on different types of scales—e.g., some ordinal and some cardinal. An underappreciated impossibility theorem due to Anna Khmelnitskaya shows that seemingly plausible constraints on aggregation across scale types are inconsistent. This impossibility threatens to render the notion of overall Fness incoherent. We attempt to defuse this threat, arguing that the impossibility depends on an overly restrictive conception of measurement and of how measurement constrains aggregation. Adopting a more flexible—and, we think, more perspicuous—conception of measurement opens an array of possibilities for aggregation across disparate scale types. (shrink)

This paper presents a new puzzle for limited aggregation. Unlike other recent puzzles, this one arises independently of the issue of rational aversion to risk. Some possible responses are laid out and explored.

After 50 years of debate, the ethics of aggregation has reached a curious stalemate, with both sides arguing that only their theory treats people as equals. I argue that, on the issue of equality, both sides are wrong. From the premise that “each counts for one,” we cannot derive the conclusion that “more count for more” or its negation. The familiar arguments from equality to aggregation presuppose more than equality: the Kamm/Scanlon “Balancing Argument” rests on what social choice theorists call (...) “(Positive) Responsiveness,” Kamm’s “Aggregation Argument” assumes that “equal” lives are fungible, and Hsieh et al. have it that spreading goods broadly best approximates equality. In each case, the crucial premise is not equality itself but a further idea that Taurek, I argue, can safely reject. I conclude with a conjecture: there is no theory-neutral argument that settles the question of whether the numbers count. (shrink)

This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...) well-being directly, without the use of invariance conditions, and to distinguish between real changes in well-being and merely representational changes in the unit of measurement. The qualitative framework is shown to have important implications for a range of issues in axiology and social choice theory, including the characterization of welfarism, axiomatic derivations of utilitarianism, the meaningfulness of prioritarianism, the informational requirements of variable-population ethics, the impossibility theorems of Arrow and others, and the metaphysics of value. (shrink)

Welfarism is the view that individual welfare is the only thing that matters. One important contribution of social choice theory has been to provide a precise formulation and axiomatic characterization of welfarism using Amartya Sen's framework of social welfare functionals. This paper is motivated by the observation that the standard formalization of welfarism is too restrictive, since a welfarist social planner need not be committed to maximizing a preference ordering or any other binary relation over alternatives. We therefore provide a (...) characterization of welfarism in a more general choice-functional setting and show that welfarism, so understood, carries no commitment to rationalizability. This characterization is compatible with welfare values having any structure whatsoever. It also sheds light on different formulations of anonymity, revealing only some of these to be fundamental requirements of impartiality. (shrink)

Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting challenge for consequentialism – one that is comparable to the objection that the theory justifies killing innocent persons to prevent large (...) numbers of less serious harms like experiencing brief, painful headaches. I outline and reject the most straightforward way for consequentialists to address this challenge, and I argue that the empirical calculations at stake reveal something rarely appreciated: consequentialists ought to sometimes favour reinforcing deontological constraints in common-sense morality rather than seeking to undermine them. (shrink)

This article offers a solution to the numbers problem within an individualist moral framework. Its central aims are as follows: to rescue individualist moral theories, such as moral contractualism, from their long-standing problem with interpersonal aggregation; to demonstrate how, proceeding from an individualist mode of justification, we can nevertheless make the numbers count without directly counting the numbers; to provide an individualist rationale for accepting a partially aggregative criterion of adjudication for resolving interpersonal trade-offs; and finally, to develop an extensionally (...) adequate version of partial aggregation that finds application in more structurally complex cases. (shrink)

The emergence of artificially sentient beings raises moral, political, and legal issues that deserve scrutiny. First, it may be difficult to understand the well-being elements of artificially sentient beings and theories of well-being may have to be reconsidered. For instance, as a theory of well-being, hedonism may need to expand the meaning of happiness and suffering or it may run the risk of being irrelevant. Second, we may have to compare the claims of artificially sentient beings with the claims of (...) humans. This calls for interspecies aggregation, which is a neglected form of interpersonal aggregation. Lastly, there are practical problems to address, such as whether to include artificially sentient beings in the political decision-making processes, whether to grant them a right to self-determination in digital worlds, and how to protect them from discrimination. Given these, the emergence of artificially sentient beings compels us to reevaluate the positions we typically hold. (shrink)

The good of those who are worse off matters more to the overall good than the good of those who are better off does. But being worse off than one’s fellows is not itself bad; nor is inequality itself bad; nor do differences in well-being matter more when well-being is lower in an absolute sense. Instead, the good of the relatively worse-off weighs more heavily in the overall good than the good of the relatively better-off does, in virtue of the (...) fact that the former are relatively worse off. This paper articulates and defends the view just described. (shrink)

Suppose we can save either a larger group of persons or a distinct, smaller group from some harm. Many people think that, all else equal, we ought to save the greater number. This article defends this view (with qualifications). But unlike earlier theories, it does not rely on the idea that several people's interests or claims receive greater aggregate weight. The argument starts from the idea that due to their stakes, the affected people have claims to have a say in (...) the rescue decision. As rescuers, our primary duty is to respect these procedural claims, which we must do by doing what these people would decide, in a process where each is given an equal vote on the matter. So in cases where each votes in their own self-interest, respect for their equal right to decide, or their autonomy, will lead us to save the greater number. The argument is explained in detail, with special attention to the questions of how, exactly, it avoids aggregation, and of why majority rule is superior to lottery procedures. The view has further advantages. Especially, it explains the “partial” relevance of numbers in cases involving unequal harms, and it does so in a way that dissolves the appearance of paradox that besets theories of “partial aggregation.”. (shrink)

Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...) one another or in sequence, and of evaluatively basic propositions via conjunction. All of these proposals turn out to carry highly controversial commitments about the good. I do not claim that these commitments are unacceptable. But they suggest that we cannot simply take for granted, as many philosophers do, that there is any such thing as the sum of well-being. (shrink)

Argues for the role of personal acquaintance in both love and concern for individuals, as such. The challenge is to say what personal acquaintance is and why it matters in the way it does. These questions are addressed through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Topics include: the ethics of aggregation, the basis of moral standing, and the value of human life.

Scale-based models of weighing reasons face challenges concerning the context sensitivity of weight, the aggregation of weight, and the methodology for determining what the weights of reasons are. I resolve these challenges.

Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism as a methodology to evaluate governmental policy across a variety of (...) policy domains: taxation, health policy, risk regulation, education, climate policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first to demonstrate how prioritarianism improves on GDP as an indicator of a society's progress over time. Edited by two senior figures in the field with contributions from some of the world's leading economists, this volume bridges the gap from the theory of prioritarianism to its practical application. (shrink)

Prioritarianism holds that improvements in someone's life are morally more valuable, the worse off the person would otherwise be. The doctrine is impartial, holding that a gain in one person's life counts exactly the same as an identical gain in the life of anyone equally well off. If we have some duty of beneficence to make the world better, prioritarianism specifies the content of the duty. Unlike the utilitarian, the prioritarian holds that we should not only seek to increase human (...) well-being, but also distribute it fairly across persons, by tilting in favor of the worse off. A variant version adds that we should also give priority to the morally deserving – to saints over scoundrels. The view is a standard for right choice of individual actions and public policies, offering a distinctive alternative to utilitarianism, sufficiency and egalitarianism. (shrink)

Many population axiologies avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by endorsing Superiority: some number of great lives is better than any number of mediocre lives. But as Nebel shows, RC follows from the Intrapersonal Repugnant Conclusion: a guaranteed mediocre life is better than a sufficiently small probability of a great life. This result is concerning because IRC is plausible. Recently, Kosonen has argued that IRC can be true while RC is false if small probabilities are discounted to zero. This article details the (...) unique problems created by combining Superiority with discounting. The resultant view, Superiority Discounting, avoids the Repugnant Conclusion only at the cost of the Preposterous Conclusion: near-certain hell for arbitrarily many people is better than near-certain heaven for arbitrarily many people. (shrink)

Should harms to different individuals be aggregated? Moderate views answer yes and no. Aggregation is appropriate in some but not all cases. Such views need to determine a threshold at which aggregation switches from appropriate to inappropriate. Alex Voorhoeve proposes a method for determining this threshold which links other-regarding and self-regarding ethics. This proposal, however, implies a spurious correlation between favoring aggregation and egoism.

Derek Parfit argues that fission is prudentially better for you than ordinary death. But is having more fission products with good lives prudentially better for you than having just one? In this paper, we argue that it is. We argue that, if your brain is split and the halves are transplanted into two recipients (who both have good lives), then it is prudentially better for you if both transplants succeed than if only one of them does (other things being equal). (...) This upshot rules out, among other things, that the prudential value of standing in the relation that matters in survival to multiple people is equal to their average well-being. (shrink)

We are constantly making choices about how to invest our time and resources. From a moral perspective, we must ask which moral concerns are most deserving of our attention. Longtermism, as e.g. defined by Greaves and MacAskill, holds that our moral focus should be on the long-term future, and that current and medium-term moral problems are comparatively insignificant. This theory is centrally based on the assumption that the moral importance of individuals can be aggregated. Since the number of individuals of (...) future generations far exceeds the number of current individuals and those closer in time, future generations are to bemorally prioritised, according to longtermism. This paper explores the implications of rejecting the premise of moral aggregation of individuals and adopting a strongly non-aggregationist position instead. It is argued that, according to strong non-aggregationism, the magnitude of the probability with which our intervention actually make a difference, as well as whether we look at the available interventions from an ex ante or ex post perspective, are relevant factors in their moral assessment. Ultimately, the conclusion is reached that strong non-aggregationism does likely not support strongly longtermist conclusions. (shrink)

John Taurek argues that, in a choice between saving the many or the few, the numbers should not count. Some object that this view clashes with the transitivity of ‘better than’; others insist the clash can be avoided. I defend a middle ground: Taurek cannot have transitivity, but that doesn’t doom his view, given a suitable conception of value. I then formalize and explore two conceptions: one context-sensitive, one multidimensional.

To your left, three strangers are drowning. To your right, one other stranger is drowning. You can effortlessly save the three by throwing a lifebuoy to your left. Alternatively, you can save the one by throwing the lifebuoy to your right. You cannot save all four. What should you do? It’s wrong to do nothing, but is it wrong to save just the one stranger? Are you morally required to save the three? Many claim that, when those you can help (...) are innocent strangers with similar interests at stake, you’re required to save the greater number. Is this claim justified? This essay reviews some doubts. (shrink)

Ethics in the tradition of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is riddled with sorites-like arguments, which lead us by what seem innocent steps to seemingly false conclusions. Take, for example, spectrum arguments for the Repugnant Conclusion that appeal to slight differences in quality of life. Several authors have taken the view that, since spectrum arguments are structurally analogous to sorites arguments, the correct response to spectrum arguments is structurally analogous to the correct response to sorites arguments. This sorites analogy is (...) here argued against. There are potential structural disanalogies between spectrum arguments and sorites arguments. But even if these arguments are relevantly structurally analogous, they differ in their content in ways that show the sorites analogy to be implausible. Two content-based disanalogies are here explored—one is inspired by Parfit’s work on reductionism, and the other involves hypersensitivity. The chapter concludes with a methodological lesson. (shrink)

Limited aggregation holds that we are only sometimes, not always, permitted to aggregate. Aggregation is permissible only when the harms and benefits are relevant to one another. But how should limited aggregation be extended to cases in which we are uncertain about what will happen? In this article, I provide a challenge to ex post limited aggregation. I reconstruct a precise version of ex post limited aggregation that relies on the notion of ex post claims. However, building a theory of (...) limited aggregation based on ex post claims leads to a dilemma. This shows that ex post limited aggregation is currently far away from being a well-defined alternative, strengthening the case for ex ante limited aggregation. (shrink)

Many axiological theories ground the goodness or badness of options in the aggregate of the goodness or the badness of these options for individuals. Most commonly, this works by summing (or averaging), and taking the expectation of this result if there is uncertainty. Such theories face problems dealing with infinite populations, for which sums or averages are infinite or undefined. They fetishize certain mathematical operations, in a subject that is not inherently mathematical. The fact that the sum is the target (...) of maximization is said to mean that the theory ignores the separateness of persons. I propose an extension of my 2014 paper, ‘Decision Theory without Representation Theorems’. I illustrate how the resulting theory can account for a case involving an infinite population, dealing with the objections. I connect this to the theory of measurement, and explain why the mathematical operations are co-extensive with the result without grounding it. Because there is no sum in these infinite populations, it avoids the worry that aggregative theories treat individuals as secondary to some aggregate. (shrink)

Is an outcome where many people are saved and one person dies better than an outcome where the one is saved and the many die? According to the standard utilitarian justification, the former is better because it has a greater sum total of well-being. This justification involves a controversial form of moral aggregation, because it is based on a comparison between aggregates of different people's well-being. Still, an alternative justification—the Argument for Best Outcomes—does not involve moral aggregation. I extend the (...) Argument for Best Outcomes to show that any utilitarian evaluation can be justified without moral aggregation. (shrink)

This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any one (...) of the premises. I argue instead that Harsanyi was right: his theorem and its weighted-utilitarian conclusion do not require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. The key to making sense of this possibility is to treat Harsanyi's weights as dimensional constants rather than dimensionless numbers. (shrink)

How should contractualists assess the permissibility of risky actions? Both main views on the question, ex ante and ex post, fail to distinguish between different kinds of risk. In this article, I argue that this overlooks a third alternative that I call “objective ex ante contractualism”. Objective ex ante substitutes discounting complaints by epistemic risk in favor of discounting by objective risk. I further argue in favor of this new view. Objective ex ante contractualism provides the best model of justifiability (...) to each. (shrink)