Aggregation and the Separateness of Persons

According to some moral theories, the gains and losses for different individuals are combined and balanced in order to judge the rightness and wrongness of an act. I call this interpersonal aggregation, or aggregation for short. According to aggregative moral theories, the disvalue of imposing heavy burdens on some limited number of people will always be justified by the fact that this brought benefits to others, no matter how small these benefits may be as long as the recipients are sufficiently numerous.1 Some philosophers are highly critical of aggregation. Critics of utilitarianism rule out aggregation from their proposed moral theories. For them, to say that aggregation should be allowed is to say that we curve up a healthy person and transplant his organs in five needy patients, because this makes the outcome strictly better. Criticism of aggregation, however, appears to go too far. Suppose that we are faced with a choice between (a) rescuing one stranger and letting five different strangers die, and (b) rescuing the five strangers and letting the one stranger die. Suppose further that there is no morally relevant difference between these six strangers. Many people believe that it is right to choose (b), i.e. saving the greater number of individuals. However, it is pointed out that the case for saving the greater number cannot be made possible unless we appeal to aggregation. That is, the judgement implicitly balances the combined losses for the five strangers and the loss for the one stranger. If we rule out aggregation, it is claimed that we must agree with John Taurek (1977), who holds that we should flip a fair coin to decide either (a) or (b). Taurek believes that there is no perspective from which the combined losses of five lives is said to be bad, and that we should give an equal and