There is no large number of very small bads that is worse than a small number of very large bads – or so, some maintain, it seems plausible to say. In this article, I criticize and reject two recently proposed vindications of the above intuition put forth by Dale Dorsey and Alex Voorhoeve. Dorsey advocates for a threshold marked by the interference with a person's global life projects: any bad that interferes with the satisfaction of a life project is worse (...) than any number of bads that don't interfere with such a life project. Such thresholds, I argue, are broadly implausible. Voorhoeve gives a contractualist account for the irrelevance of minor bads. His account, I argue, does not, among other things, provide the right kind of reason in defence of the above intuition. (shrink)

In recent years, many non-consequentialists such as Frances Kamm and Thomas Scanlon have been puzzling over what has come to be known as the Number Problem, which is how to show that the greater number in a rescue situation should be saved without aggregating the claims of the many, a typical kind of consequentialist move that seems to violate the separateness of persons. In this article, I argue that these non-consequentialists may be making the task more difficult than necessary, because (...) allowing aggregation does not prevent one from being a non-consequentialist. I shall explain how a non-consequentialist can still respect the separateness of persons while allowing for aggregation. (shrink)

In this article, we defend pairwise comparison as a method to resolve conflicting claims from different people that cannot be jointly satisfied because of a scarcity of resources. We consider Michael Otsuka's recent challenge that pairwise comparison leads to intransitive choices for the (someone who believes the numbers should not count in forced choices among lives) and Frances Kamm's responses to Otsuka's challenge. We argue that Kamm's responses do not succeed, but that the threat they are designed to meet is (...) illusory. Once the method of pairwise comparison is understood in a manner consistent with its proposed use, the challenge disappears. In making this argument, we examine questions about the interpretation of pairwise comparison and maintain that it must be understood as a method for ensuring that decisions are justifiable from the perspective of each affected individual. (shrink)

In response to the charge that deontic ("argent-centered") restrictions are paradoxical, several recent writers suggest that such restrictions find support within T.M. Scanlon's contractualism. I suggest that this claim is only interesting if these restrictions are stronger than those supported by indirect consequentialism. I argue that contractualism cannot support restrictions any stronger than those supported by indirect consequentialism. The contractualists have mislocated the source of the paradox, which arises under any theory that defines right action in patient-focused terms. Consequentialism and (...) contractualism share this feature, so contractualism cannot support stronger deontic restrictions than consequentialism supports. (shrink)