Innumerate ethics

Abstract

Moral decisions involving a choice between saving one individual or a larger number of people must account for the aggregate weight of individual losses. While individuals may possess agent-relative permissions to prioritize their own welfare or that of their friends, these permissions do not extend to third-party rescuers who incur no personal cost. A rescuer’s obligation to save the many over the few remains intact because the moral significance of a loss is not restricted to the perspective of a single sufferer. The contention that suffering is not additive—based on the fact that no individual experiences the sum of collective pain—erroneously conflates the subjective experience of harm with its objective moral disvalue. If a harm to one person is an evil, then identical harms to multiple people constitute a greater total evil. Furthermore, a commitment to equal concern for all individuals requires that numbers count; to save the larger number is to give equal weight to each person’s survival by recognizing that each additional life represents an additional claim of equal value. Strategies such as flipping a coin to decide between one life and many fail to respect this equality, as they disregard the specific claims of the additional persons involved. Ultimately, the principles of beneficence and distributive justice support the conclusion that, when faced with equal harms, saving more lives is the morally required course of action. – AI-generated abstract.