Title: The Disrespectfulness of Weighted Survival Lotteries
Stream: Ethics - Medical Ethics
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Joseph Adams, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Abstract:
If an agent can save the lives of only one of non-overlapping groups of people, then, other things being equal, it might seem, they ought to save the group that consists of the greatest number of people. John Taurek objects that this ‘greatest number’ view fails to respect the equal moral significance of each saveable individual. The greatest-number view, we might think, treats some saveable individuals unfairly. Taurek argues that the agent instead ought to hold an ‘equal chance’ lottery to determine which group to save. If the greatest-number view takes the number of people in each group too seriously, though, the equal-chance view does not take it seriously enough. Seeking a compromise, we might say that the agent ought to hold a proportionally weighted lottery to determine which group to save. Jens Timmermann suggests that this proposal is practically equivalent to his own, ‘individualist lottery’ view. This practical equivalence, however, is in fact dependent upon the way in which the weighted-lottery view is specified with respect to particular cases of changing information. In such cases, the agent has held a lottery that they believe to have been proportionally weighted, despite believing that, at the time of the lottery, they were mistaken about the number of people in each group.
Given the most plausible specification of the weighted-lottery view with respect to these cases, this view does not in every case respect the equal moral significance of saveable individuals. So specified, the weighted-lottery view offers no solution to Taurek’s objection.
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