Yeah I feel that sometimes theories get really convoluted and ad hoc in an attempt to avoid unpalatable conclusions. This seems to be one of those times.
I can give Scanlon a free pass when he says under his theory we should save two people from certain death rather than one person from certain death because the ‘additional’ person would have some sort of complaint. However when the authors of this post say, for a similar reason, that the theory implies it’s better to do an intervention that will save two people with probability 90% rather than one person with probability 100%, I just think they’re undermining the theory.
The logic is that the ‘additional’ person in the pair has a complaint because you’re acting as if they aren’t there. But you aren’t acting as if they aren’t there—you’re noticing they have a lesser claim than the single individual and so are (perhaps quite reluctantly) accommodating the single individual’s larger claim. Which is kind of the whole point of the theory!
Yeah I feel that sometimes theories get really convoluted and ad hoc in an attempt to avoid unpalatable conclusions. This seems to be one of those times.
I can give Scanlon a free pass when he says under his theory we should save two people from certain death rather than one person from certain death because the ‘additional’ person would have some sort of complaint. However when the authors of this post say, for a similar reason, that the theory implies it’s better to do an intervention that will save two people with probability 90% rather than one person with probability 100%, I just think they’re undermining the theory.
The logic is that the ‘additional’ person in the pair has a complaint because you’re acting as if they aren’t there. But you aren’t acting as if they aren’t there—you’re noticing they have a lesser claim than the single individual and so are (perhaps quite reluctantly) accommodating the single individual’s larger claim. Which is kind of the whole point of the theory!