This article is an attempt to defend Scanlon's contractualism against the so-called aggregation problems. Scanlon's contractualism attempts to make sense of right and wrong in terms of principles which no one could reasonably reject. These principles are a function of what kind personal objections persons can make to alternative sets of moral principles. Because of this, it has been argued that contractualism is unable to account for how groups of different sizes are to be treated. In this article, I argue (...) that contactualism, even if with its focus on personal burdens, can come to plausible conclusions in the group cases. (shrink)

In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.

The three most common responses to Taurek’s ‘numbers problem’ are saving the greater number, equal chance lotteries and weighted lotteries. Weighted lotteries have perhaps received the least support, having been criticized by Scanlon What We Owe to Each Other ( 1998 ) and Hirose ‘Fairness in Life and Death Cases’ ( 2007 ). This article considers these objections in turn, and argues that they do not succeed in refuting the fairness of a weighted lottery, which remains a potential solution to (...) cases of conflict. Moreover, it shows how these responses actually lead to a new argument for weighted lotteries, appealing to fairness and Pareto-optimality. (shrink)

The core of this book is a novel theory of distributive justice premised on the fundamental moral equality of persons. In the light of this theory, Rakowski considers three types of problems which urgently require solutions-- the distribution of resources, property rights, and the saving of life--and provides challenging and unconventional answers. Further, he criticizes the economic analysis of law as a normative theory, and develops an alternative account of tort and property law.

This book sets forth a novel theory of distributive justice premised on the fundamental moral equality of persons. It argues that, subject to certain limitations on personal sacrifice, no one should have less valuable resources and opportunities available to him than anyone else, simply invirtue of some chance occurrence the risk of which he did not choose to incur. Applying this principle to the distribution of wealth and income, the specification of property rights, and the allocation of scarce medical resources, (...) Professor Rakowski reaches challenging, often unconventional,conclusions. He further criticizes the economic analysis of law as a normative theory, and develops an alternative account of tort law.Among the topics discussed are the principles by which earnings, wealth, and gifts should be taxed; whether the compulsory removal of organs for transplantation can be justified; how doctors and public officials should make life-or-death decisions when all those endangered cannot be saved; and themorality of killing human beings and nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 34 (2006): 109-35.

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)