In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly well-suited to address this issue of moral uncertainty with respect to agents that have credence in moral theories that are not fully consequentialist.
On one view, let's call it Pure Aggregation, in both cases we have to see how large N is before deciding what to do. If N1 gets large enough, we should save the people from paralysis. And if N2 gets large enough, we should prevent the mild headaches. According to another view, Anti-Aggregation, in both cases we should save the one person from death: we should simply satisfy the strongest claim, no matter how large the number of people possessing competing weaker claims gets. Many people believe that we should take prima facie inconsistent stances on these two cases. 1 That is, we should accept aggregation of the lesser claims in Case 1, but not in Case 2: there is some number of people we should save from * I am grateful to Aart van Gils for sparking my interest in this topic. The paper was presented and discussed at Oxford, York, and Goethe Universität's Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. For further help in improving the paper, I am grateful to Aart van Gils,
Perhaps the best-known theory of fairness is John Broome's: that fairness is the proportional satisfaction of claims. In this article, I question whether claims are the appropriate focus for a theory of fairness, at least as Broome understands them in his current theory. If fairness is the proportionate satisfaction of claims, I argue, then the following would be true: fairness could not help determine the correct distribution of claims; fairness could not be used to evaluate the distribution of claims; fairness could not guide us in distributing claims (or unowed goods); we could not have a claim to be treated fairly; and we would not be wronged when treated unfairly. These entailments mean that it is questionable that fairness is concerned with claims in the way Broome suggests. At the very least, the relationship between fairness and claims appears to be more complex than the picture painted by Broome.
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