For those who won’t read this dense 40-page essay, Parfit (among other worthwhile discussion) discusses Nagel’s prioritarian arguments:
By straightforward intuition: the needs of the worse-off are more urgent and thus higher-priority.
By straightforward intuition: equality is fundamentally valuable.
For instrumental (indirect) reasons: equality generally has good effects.
We can reject the first two points for various reasons (chief among them: accepting aggregative consequentialism, or rejecting theories that rely on persons as irreducible-locations-of-value). We should pay great heed to the third point, not ignoring indirect effects—but by the time it is specified that one action produces 9 QALYs and another 10, we have already taken indirect effects into account. (If the 9-QALY action has other positive indirect effects, we should have called it a 12-QALY action, or whatever the sum comes out to.)
Derek Parfit has a good discussion of “prioritarian” views that place greater weight on the welfare of the less well-off: https://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/joomlatools-files/docman-files/3ParfitEqualityorPriority2000.pdf
Thanks!
For those who won’t read this dense 40-page essay, Parfit (among other worthwhile discussion) discusses Nagel’s prioritarian arguments:
By straightforward intuition: the needs of the worse-off are more urgent and thus higher-priority.
By straightforward intuition: equality is fundamentally valuable.
For instrumental (indirect) reasons: equality generally has good effects.
We can reject the first two points for various reasons (chief among them: accepting aggregative consequentialism, or rejecting theories that rely on persons as irreducible-locations-of-value). We should pay great heed to the third point, not ignoring indirect effects—but by the time it is specified that one action produces 9 QALYs and another 10, we have already taken indirect effects into account. (If the 9-QALY action has other positive indirect effects, we should have called it a 12-QALY action, or whatever the sum comes out to.)