Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

Over the years, consequentialism has been subjected to numerous serious objections. Its adherents, however, have been remarkably successful in fending them off. As I argue in this paper, the reason why the case against consequentialism has not been more successful lies, at least partly, in the methodological approach that critics have commonly used. Their arguments have usually proceeded in two steps. First, a definition of consequentialism is given. Then, objections are put forward based on that definition. This procedure runs into (...) one of two problems. Substantive criticisms of consequentialism can only be formulated, if the posited definition is sufficiently concrete and narrow. In that case, however, consequentialists can defend themselves using a strategy that I call “interpretive divergence”. They can simply point out that the critic's definition does not accord with their understanding of consequentialism to which criticisms do not apply. If, on the other hand, an all-encompassing definition is used, it is so abstract that it is doubtful whether any substantive criticisms can be formulated. To escape this dilemma, I sketch a methodological approach which drops the assumption that consequentialism should be defined. It assumes, rather, that the term “consequentialism” should be interpreted as a Wittgensteinian family resemblance term. (shrink)

In this article I explore a kind of tragic choice that has not received due attention, one in which you have to save only one of two persons but the probability of saving is not equal (and all other things are equal). Different proposals are assessed, taking as models proposals for a much more discussed tragic choice situation: saving different numbers of persons. I hold that cases in which (only) numbers are different are structurally similar to cases in which (only) (...) probabilities are different. After a brief defense of this claim, I conclude that some version of consequentialism seems more promising for offering a plausible solution to the probability case. (shrink)

Faced with a choice between saving one stranger and saving a group of strangers, some people endorse weighted lotteries, which give a strictly greater chance of being saved to the group of strangers than the single stranger. In this paper I attempt to criticize this view. I first consider a particular version of the weighted lotteries, Frances Kamm's procedure of proportional chances, and point out two implausible implications of her proposal. Then, I consider weighted lotteries in general, and claim (1) (...) that the correct thing to distribute is not the chance of being saved but the good of being saved, (2) that assigning some chance to the single stranger is not the only way to give a positive (and equal) respect to the people concerned, and (3) that the weighted lottery appears to be deceptive since it would show the respect to the single stranger in a negligible way. (shrink)

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)

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.

In this article, I critique a moral argument developed in Frances Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. The argument, which I label the Best Outcome Argument, aims to criticize the Taurekian idea that it is not worse if more people die than if fewer do in conflict situations, where it is hard to distinguish individuals from one another solely by reference to the relative strength of their claims. I argue that the Best Outcome Argument is flawed for three (...) reasons: the symmetry feature defined by the impartiality principle holds only in a limited class of conflict situations; individuals should be treated in a consistent way throughout the whole process of reasoning; comparative evaluations gained in different contexts, at least in some cases, cannot be used in one and the same argument. (shrink)

In this thesis, I discuss the aggregation problem for T. M. Scanlon’s “contractualism”. I argue that Scanlonian contractualists have the following two options when it comes to the aggregation problem. First, they can choose to limit aggregation directly via a specific version of the Relevance View, “Sequential Claims-Matching”. Second, Scanlonian contractualists can adopt a so-called “mixed solution” of which I propose a specific version. My mixed solution does not limit aggregation. Rather, it either avoids some of the counterintuitive results in (...) certain cases, or at least makes these same results look a lot less counterintuitive by putting them into perspective thanks to a plausible plurality of precisely specified values. The stakes between these two options are as follows. The first option justifies Scanlon’s intuition in one vs. many cases of which his “World Cup Case” is one example, but it comes at the cost of a seemingly quite limited range of application: any version of the Relevance View only works in cases in which we have no more than two groups of competing claimants. The second option has the exact opposite implications: my mixed solution cannot justify Scanlon’s intuition in one vs. many cases, but it could be applied to any case with any number of groups of competing claimants. In this choice between pre-theoretical intuition and feasibility, I would urge Scanlonian contractualists to choose feasibility. (shrink)

This article addresses a dilemma about autonomous vehicles: how to respond to trade-off scenarios in which all possible responses involve the loss of life but there is a choice about whose life or lives are lost. I consider four options: kill fewer people, protect passengers, equal concern for survival, and recognize everyone’s interests. I solve this dilemma via what I call the new trolley problem, which seeks a rationale for the intuition that it is unethical to kill a smaller number (...) of people to avoid killing a greater number of people based on numbers alone. I argue that killing a smaller number of people to avoid killing a greater number of people based on numbers alone is unethical because it disrespects the humanity of the individuals in the smaller-numbered group. I defend the recognize-everyone’s-interests algorithm, which will probably kill fewer people but will not do so based on numbers alone. (shrink)

A central strand in philosophical debate over the just distribution of resources attempts to juggle three competing imperatives: helping those who are worst off, helping those who will benefit the most, and then – beyond this – determining when to aggregate such ‘worst off’ and ‘benefit’ claims, and when instead to treat no such claim as greater than that which any individual by herself can exert. Yet as various philosophers have observed, ‘we have no satisfactory theoretical characterization’ as to how (...) to weigh each of the three imperatives against one another, we find it ‘difficult to state... precise or comprehensive conclusions’, and we do not yet have a ‘metric for integrating the three measures’. In what follows, I offer an approach to weighing the three criteria against one another that yields resolutions – in Hard Cases of the ‘saving one infant's life versus replacing ten elderly people's hips’ sort – that are cardinally definitive, intuitively satisfactory and theoretically justified. (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)

This article addresses Taruek’s much discussed Number Problem from a non-consequentialist point of view. I argue that some versions of the Number Problem have no solution, meaning that no alternative is at least as choice-worthy as the others, and that the best way to behave in light of such moral indeterminacy is to let chance make the decision. I contrast my proposal with F M Kamm ’s nonconsequentialist argument for saving the greatest number, the Argument for Best Outcomes, which I (...) argue does not follow from the premises it is based on. (shrink)

The numbers problem concerns the question of what is the right thing to do in trade-off cases where one can save different non-overlapping groups of persons, but not everyone. Proponents of mixed solutions argue that both saving the many and holding a lottery to determine whom to save can each be morally right in such cases, depending on the relative sizes of the groups involved. In his book The Dimensions of Consequentialism, Martin Peterson presents an ingenious version of such an (...) approach that avoids a commitment to interpersonal value aggregation, which is highly controversial and rejected by many philosophers for a number of reasons. I criticise Peterson’s proposal by first arguing that it cannot account for the idea that holding a lottery is morally wrong if differences in numbers are very large, and by second pointing out that it relies on implausible assumptions about what is good for an individual. Given the shortcomings of Peterson’s non-aggregationist version of a mixed solution, I next address the issue of how problematic a commitment to interpersonal aggregation really is. To this end, I present an aggregationist version of a mixed solution that is reason-based and bypasses most standard objections to interpersonal value aggregation. I conclude that although there is reason to be optimistic, it remains to be seen whether a mixed solution can be worked out in a fully satisfying way. (shrink)

You must either save a group of m people or a group of n people. If there are no morally relevant diff erences among the people, which group should you save? is problem is known as the number problem. e recent discussion has focussed on three proposals: (i) Save the greatest number of people, (ii) Toss a fair coin, or (iii) Set up a weighted lottery, in which the probability of saving m people is m / m + n , (...) and the probability of saving n people is n / m + n . is contribution examines a fourth alternative, the mixed solution, according to which both fairness and the total number of people saved count. It is shown that the mixed solution can be defended without assuming the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of value. (shrink)

This article discusses some ethical principles for distributing pandemic influenza vaccine and other indivisible goods. I argue that a number of principles for distributing pandemic influenza vaccine recently adopted by several national governments are morally unacceptable because they put too much emphasis on utilitarian considerations, such as the ability of the individual to contribute to society. Instead, it would be better to distribute vaccine by setting up a lottery. The argument for this view is based on a purely consequentialist account (...) of morality; i.e. an action is right if and only if its outcome is optimal. However, unlike utilitarians I do not believe that alternatives should be ranked strictly according to the amount of happiness or preference satisfaction they bring about. Even a mere chance to get some vaccine matters morally, even if it is never realized. (shrink)