Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:51:00.491Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Relevance and Non-consequentialist Aggregation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2014

J. PAUL KELLEHER
J. PAUL KELLEHER*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin – Madison, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Interpersonal aggregation involves the combining and weighing of benefits and losses to multiple individuals in the course of determining what ought to be done. Most consequentialists embrace thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation, the view that any large benefit to each of a few people can be morally outweighed by allocating any smaller benefit to each of many others, so long as this second group is sufficiently large. This would permit letting one person die in order to cure some number of mild headaches instead. Most non-consequentialists reject thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation despite also believing it is permissible to let one person die in order to prevent many cases of paraplegia instead. Non-consequentialists defend this asymmetry largely on the basis of intuition, and some rely on the notion of relevance to formalize the grounding intuitions. This article seeks to clarify and strengthen the non-consequentialist notion of relevance by engaging with three objections to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 385 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Norcross, A., ‘Two Dogmas of Deontology: Aggregation, Rights, and the Separateness of Persons’, Social Philosophy & Policy 26 (2008), pp. 76–95, at 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Parfit, D., Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 388Google Scholar.

3 For an argument against thoroughgoing aggregation within the domain of axiology, see Dorsey, D., ‘Headaches, Lives, and Value’, Utilitas 21 (2009), pp. 36–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 239–40Google Scholar. See also Kamm, F. M., Morality, Mortality: Death and Whom to Save from It, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.

5 Norcross, ‘Two Dogmas’, p. 81.

6 See, for example, Temkin, L. S. ‘A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (1996), pp. 175–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Derek Parfit thinks this is a serious problem for a view which invokes the notion of relevance (what Parfit calls ‘The Close Enough View’). Whether this is in fact a serious problem turns in part on whether there can be moral dilemmas and whether this might be one. I lack the space to discuss this adequately here. See Parfit, D., On What Matters (Oxford, 2011), p. 203Google Scholar.

8 Norcross, ‘Two Dogmas’, p. 83.

9 Norcross, ‘Two Dogmas’, p. 83.

10 Lefkowitz, D., ‘On the Concept of a Morally Relevant Harm’, Utilitas 20 (2008), pp. 409–23, at 416CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Lefkowitz, ‘On the Concept’, p. 418.

12 Lefkowitz, ‘On the Concept’, p. 418.

13 Broome, J., Weighing Lives (Oxford, 2004), p. 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 It is worth noting that what Norcross calls deontic ‘intransitivity’ is arguably not really a form of intransitivity at all. As Daniel M. Hausman explains, ‘[T]ransitivity concerns preferences over a single set of alternatives. Transitivity says nothing about how preferences over one set of alternatives {apple pie, blueberry pie} should be related to preferences over a different set of alternatives {apple pie, blueberry pie, cherry pie}.’ See Hausman, D. M., Preference, Value, Choice and Welfare (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 15–16Google Scholar.

15 Nagel, T., ‘Equality’, in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1991 [1979]), pp. 106–27, at 123Google Scholar.

16 Nagel, ‘Equality’, p. 118.

17 Nagel, ‘Equality’, p. 125.

18 Scanlon, What We Owe, p. 241.

19 Scanlon, What We Owe, pp. 239–40.

20 Scanlon, What We Owe, p. 240.

21 This case was inspired by a case presented by Daniels, Norman in ‘Reasonable Disagreement about Identified vs. Statistical Victims’, Hastings Center Report 42 (2012), pp. 35–45, at 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a related risk-based case, see Reibetanz, S., ‘Contractualism and Aggregation’, Ethics 108 (1998), pp. 296–311, at 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See Frick, Johann, ‘Treatment vs Prevention in the Fight against HIV/AIDS and the Problem of Identified vs Statistical Lives’, Identified v. Statistical Lives: Ethical, Legal, and Medical Perspectives, ed. Cohen, I. Glenn, Daniels, Norman and Eyal, Nir (Oxford, in press)Google Scholar. Unaware of Frick's work at the time, I discussed the ex post view in ‘Prevention, Rescue, and Tiny Risks’, Public Health Ethics 6 (2013), pp. 252–61, under the name of ‘Brock and Wikler's view’ of how to assess the strength of claims.

23 A notable exception is Taurek, J., ‘Should the Numbers Count’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), pp. 293–316Google ScholarPubMed.

24 I deploy this case to make similar point in ‘Prevention’.

25 Of course, both defenders and opponents of the ex post view can agree that Alice's antecedent risks gave us good epistemic reason to believe that Alice had a strong claim. But that is the only role that proponents of the ex post view give to antecedent risks, and this is what makes that view so implausible.

26 See again Kelleher, ‘Prevention’, and Frick, ‘Treatment vs Prevention’.

27 The argument from tiny risks therefore provides reasons to join Kamm in talking about (ir)relevant goods, rather than (ir)relevant claims. See Kamm, Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm (Oxford, 2007), p. 34.

28 Kamm, F. M., ‘Owing, Justifying, and Rejecting’, Mind 111 (2002), pp. 323–54, at 348CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis in original.

29 Nagel, ‘Equality’, p. 127.

30 Crisp, R., ‘Equality, Priority, and Compassion’, Ethics 113 (2003), pp. 745–63, at 757CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Draper, K., ‘The Personal and Impersonal Dimensions of Benevolence’, Noûs 36 (2002), pp. 201–27, at 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Although he only makes passing reference to aggregation, Richard Yetter Chappell provides a valuable related discussion in ‘Value Receptacles’, Noûs (forthcoming).

33 Broome, J., ‘Fairness’, in his Ethics out of Economics (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 111–22, at 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Broome, ‘Fairness’, p. 119.

35 Broome, ‘Fairness’, p. 120.

36 Broome, ‘All Goods Are Relevant’, Summary Measures of Population Health, ed. C. J. L. Murray, J. A. Salomon, C. D. Mathers and A. D. Lopez (Geneva, 2002), pp. 727–9, at 728.

37 Hooker, B., ‘Fairness’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005), pp. 329–52, at 349CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Hooker, ‘Fairness’, p. 349; emphasis added.

39 Kamm, F. M., ‘Replies’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998), pp. 969–74, at 973–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Kamm, Intricate Ethics, p. 47 n. 74. In context it is clear that by ‘could’ Kamm means ‘could permissibly’.

41 Kamm, Intricate Ethics, pp. 36–7.

42 Scanlon, What We Owe, p. 237.

43 Dougherty, T., ‘Aggregation, Beneficence and Chance’, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 7 (2013), pp. 1–19, at 17Google Scholar.

44 For helpful comments and discussion, I thank Paul Audi, Thomas Dougherty, Molly Gardner, Dan Hausman, Gordon Hull, Justin Klocksiem, Win-chiat Lee, John C. Moskop, Peter Nichols, Robert Streiffer, and audiences at Amherst College, the University of Nebraska-Omaha, the 2012 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in Boulder, Colorado, and the 2013 Junior Scholars in Bioethics Workshop at Wake Forest University.