Great harms from small benefits grow: How death can be outweighed by headaches

Abstract

Consequentialism is sometimes criticized for conflicting with the following principle, supposedly endorsed by ordinary moral intuitions: Worse: other things being equal, it is worse that one person die a premature death than that any number of people suffer moderate headaches for twenty-four hours. I argue that most of us, consequentialists and nonconsequentialists alike, are in fact committed to the denial of worse. Ordinary moral intuitions accept the following principles: Risk: Other things being equal, it is better that one person die than that five million each incur a one in a million risk of dying. Many headaches: Other things being equal, it is better that five million people each incur a one in a million risk of dying than that they each suffer a moderate headache for twenty-four hours. Risk and many headache, together with the transitivity of ‘better than’, entail the denial of worse.