It might be objected that the problem is imagining how the benefits of sparing few days of malaria to 1 billion people are aggregated, and that our feeling or repugnance derives from our failure to see that this aggregated benefit is immensely larger than the benefit of increased educational opportunities for few people. But this begs the question. The problem with ARC is exactly that to many of us the benefit of giving better education to 100 people seems worthy of giving up the tiny aggregated benefit of sparing few days of non-fatal malaria to 1 billion people.
I think he fails to do justice to this objection. It not mere question-begging to suggest that people’s intuitions fail to deal with the large numbers correctly; it is a well-known fact that people’s intuitions struggle to deal with such cases! This is commonly referred to as Scope Insensitivity—it occurs even in cases where the outcome ‘should’ be obvious.
I think he fails to do justice to this objection. It not mere question-begging to suggest that people’s intuitions fail to deal with the large numbers correctly; it is a well-known fact that people’s intuitions struggle to deal with such cases! This is commonly referred to as Scope Insensitivity—it occurs even in cases where the outcome ‘should’ be obvious.