The author argues that only when the two harms are morally relevant to one another may an agent take into account the number of people he can save. He defends an orbital conception of morally relevant harm, according to which harms that fall within the of a given harm are relevant to it, while all other harms are not. The possibility of preventing a harm provides both a first-order reason to prevent that harm, and a second-order reason not to consider (...) preventing irrelevant harms. This understanding of a morally relevant harm avoids two objections to such a concept recently raised by Alastair Norcross: identifying a point along a continuous scale of harms at which the divide between relevant and irrelevant harms occurs, and the entailment that the mere possibility of preventing harm that one is morally forbidden from preventing can determine which of two other actions morality requires. (shrink)

Should we allow grave harm to befall one individual so as to prevent minor harms befalling sufficiently many other individuals? This is a question of aggregation. Can many small harms ‘add up’, so that, collectively, they morally outweigh a greater harm? The ‘Close Enough View’ supports a moderate position: aggregation is permissible when, and only when, the conflicting harms are sufficiently similar, or ‘close enough’, to each other. This paper surveys a range of formally precise interpretations of this view, and (...) reveals some of the problems they face. It also proposes a novel interpretation which avoids these problems. (shrink)

Is there any number of people you should save from paralysis rather than saving one person from death? Is there any number of people you should save from a headache rather than saving one person from death? Many people answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’, respectively. They therefore accept a partially aggregative moral view. Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that the most promising partially aggregative views in the literature have implausible implications in certain cases in which there are additions or subtractions to (...) the groups of people that we can save. Several philosophers have begun responding to this argument by developing partially aggregative views that avoid the relevant implications. In this paper, I extend Tomlin’s argument to create a dilemma that no partially aggregative view can avoid. I conclude that we should accept a fully aggregative moral view. (shrink)