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)

After providing a novel taxonomy of lottery procedures for fairly distributing scarce goods, I defend a new weighted lottery theory. This taxonomy is necessary because the debate between unweighted and weighted lottery theorists overlooks a range of cases, overlap cases, in which conducting an unweighted lottery is impossible or implausible. Therefore, to account for all such cases, lottery theorists must adopt a weighted lottery. However, while no extant weighted lottery is adequate in overlap cases, my new weighted lottery theory is. (...) I conclude by discussing my theory’s practical implications. (shrink)

A very short, exegetical paper about Taurek's "Should the Numbers Count?," arguing against the view that Taurek requires giving chances.

Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What's more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point forward—no (...) more cost than it warranted at the outset. If you now succeed, the total cost will exceed the upper bound marked at the beginning. But the additional cost from this point is below that upper bound. And the good you will achieve is undiminished. How do the moral costs you have already inflicted bear upon your decision now? (shrink)

Debunking arguments use empirical evidence about our moral beliefs - in particular, about their causal origins, or about how they depend on various causes - in order to reach an epistemic conclusion about the trustworthiness of such beliefs. In this thesis, I investigate the scope and limits of debunking arguments, and their implications for what we should believe about morality. I argue that debunking arguments can in principle work - they are based on plausible epistemic premises, and at least some (...) of them avoid putative problems concerning regress and redundancy. However, I also argue that some debunking arguments fall short because they are insufficiently supported by the empirical evidence. By considering different objections, analyses, and a case study, I explore the conditions for a successful debunking argument. (shrink)

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)

The rapid adoption and implementation of artificial intelligence in medicine creates an ontologically distinct situation from prior care models. There are both potential advantages and disadvantages with such technology in advancing the interests of patients, with resultant ontological and epistemic concerns for physicians and patients relating to the instatiation of AI as a dependent, semi- or fully-autonomous agent in the encounter. The concept of libertarian paternalism potentially exercised by AI (and those who control it) has created challenges to conventional assessments (...) of patient and physician autonomy. The unclear legal relationship between AI and its users cannot be settled presently, an progress in AI and its implementation in patient care will necessitate an iterative discourse to preserve humanitarian concerns in future models of care. This paper proposes that physicians should neither uncritically accept nor unreasonably resist developments in AI but must actively engage and contribute to the discourse, since AI will affect their roles and the nature of their work. One’s moral imaginative capacity must be engaged in the questions of beneficence, autonomy, and justice of AI and whether its integration in healthcare has the potential to augment or interfere with the ends of medical practice. (shrink)

Suppose that an autonomous vehicle encounters a situation where (i) imposing a risk of harm on at least one person is unavoidable; and (ii) a choice about how to allocate risks of harm between different persons is required. What does morality require in these cases? Derek Leben defends a Rawlsian answer to this question. I argue that we have reason to reject Leben’s answer.