Comparing harms: headaches and human lives

Abstract

Consequentialists are sometimes unsettled by the following kind of example: a vast number of people are experiencing fairly minor headaches, which will continue unabated for another hour, unless an innocent person is killed, in which case they will cease immediately. Is it permissible to kill that innocent person in order to avoid the vast number of headaches? For a consequentialist, the answer to that question depends on the relative values of the world with the headaches but without the premature death, and the world without the headaches but with the premature death. If the latter world is at least as good as the former, it is permissible to kill the innocent. This has led some to reject the permissibility of killing an innocent person to save multiple lives in analogous cases, which seems at odds with common sense morality. However, comparing worlds as wholes like this can avoid considering the value of a single life. The author of this article claims that a consequentialist can accept that it is sometimes permissible to kill an innocent person to save multiple lives, without rejecting the great value of individual lives, by rejecting the transitivity of ‘better than.’ – AI-generated abstract.