Should the probabilities count

Authors: Katharina Berndt Rasmussen

Publish Date: 2011/01/14

Volume: 159, Issue: 2, Pages: 205-218

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Abstract

When facing a choice between saving one person and saving many some people have argued that fairness requires us to decide without aggregating numbers rather we should decide by coin toss or some form of lottery or alternatively we should straightforwardly save the greater number but justify this in a nonaggregating contractualist way This paper expands the debate beyond wellknown number cases to previously underconsidered probability cases in which not only the numbers of people but also the probabilities of success for saving people vary It is shown that in these latter cases both the coin toss and the lottery lead to what is called an awkward conclusion which makes probabilities count in a problematic way Attempts to avoid this conclusion are shown to lead into difficulties as well Finally it is shown that while the greater number method cannot be justified on contractualist grounds for probability cases it may be replaced by another decision method which is so justified This decision method is extensionally equivalent to maximising expected value and seems to be the least problematic way of dealing with probability cases in a nonaggregating mannerThanks to Emil Andersson Gustaf Arrhenius John Broome Iwao Hirose Frej Klem Thomsen Kasper LippertRasmussen Jonas Olson Niklas OlssonYaouzis Ben Saunders Julian Savulescu Folke Tersman Gerard Vong and two anonymous referees as well as the participants of the James Martin Advanced Research Seminar at University of Oxford the PhDseminar in practical philosophy at Stockholm University the Applied Ethics Graduate Discussion Group at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics University of Oxford and the 2009 conference of Nordic Network for Political Theory in Copenhagen for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper The author thankfully acknowledges travel grants for the latter two meetings from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation

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