Suppose that each of the following four conditions obtains: 1. You can save either a greater or a lesser number of innocent people from (equally) serious harm. 2. You can do so at trivial cost to yourself. 3. If you act to save, then the harm you prevent is harm that would not have been prevented if you had done nothing. 4. All other things are equal. A skeptic about saving the greater number rejects the common-sensical claim that you have (...) a duty to save the greater number in such circumstances. (shrink)

In "What We Owe to Each Other", T. M. Scanlon argues that one should save the greater number when faced with the choice between saving one life and two or more different lives. It is, Scanlon claims, a virtue of this argument that it does not appeal to the claims of groups of individuals but only to the claims of individuals. I demonstrate that this argument for saving the greater number, indeed, depends, contrary to what Scanlon says, upon an appeal (...) to the claim of a group of individuals to be saved. (shrink)