Only Aggregationists Respect the Separateness of Persons

I often find myself thinking that the conventional wisdom in moral philosophy gets a lot of things backwards. For example, I’ve previously discussed how deontology is much more deeply self-effacing (making objectively right actions, and not just bungled attempts to act rightly, lamentable) than consequentialism. In this post, I’ll explain why I think that only “aggregationist” views—on which five people being tortured to death is five times worse (all else equal) than just one person suffering this awful fate—fully respect the separateness of persons.

Ethics as Normative Psychology

First, some background. Normative ethics can be understood as specifying what psychological attitudes are warranted towards different objects. To say that life is good is to say that it warrants desire or similar pro-attitudes (in an idealized sense that abstracts away from our cognitive limitations).

So to say that each person’s well-being is a separate, non-fungible good, is to say that we should (ideally) have distinct non-instrumental desires for each person’s well-being. (This is the core idea of my ‘Value Receptacles’ paper.)

You could imagine a kind of utilitarian who fails to do this: someone who just has a single desire to maximize aggregate welfare, and sees each person as a constitutive means to this end, just as individual dollar bills are mere constitutive means to your aggregate wealth (you don’t care about the bills as individuals—they are replaceable without regret). Then, rather than feeling torn when forced to choose between two equally worthy lives, this agent would feel stark indifference: the choice of which life to save would seem no more significant to them than the choice between a $20 bill or two tens. I think it would be obscene to view human lives as fungible in this way, so I show how to understand utilitarianism in a way that avoids this flaw (but still allows you to make trade-offs—you can retain commensurability without fungibility). By having separate desires for each person’s well-being, my token-pluralistic utilitarian values each person separately in the most literal sense, and this is reflected psychologically in their (i) feeling the loss whenever an individual is harmed, and (ii) feeling a different loss (due to a different desire of theirs being thwarted) depending on which individual is harmed.

In what follows, I’ll argue that anti-aggregationists fail to value people independently in this way.

Belief-Desire Psychology and Independent ...