Aggregation, Complaints, and Risk

Abstract

Many of our acts benefit some people and burden others. According to some moral views, when all other things are equal, we are morally required to act in the way that maximizes the sum of benefits minus burdens. 1 We can say that these views are aggregative. The bestknown aggregative view is Utilitarianism, but there are others. 2 Aggregative views tend to have counterintuitive implications in cases in which we must choose between imposing large burdens on each of a few people and imposing small burdens on each of many. 3 T. M. Scanlon offers the following illustration. 4

Frege’s puzzle and the ex ante Pareto principle

“…The problem of giving a complete definition of the ex ante Pareto principle has analogues for many other principles that make use of the idea of expected welfare-including for example fairness principles that favour distributions that give people equal expected welfare, all else being equal (Diamond 1967), or that rate outcomes higher when they were chosen by fair selection processes (Broome 1984). The problem also arises for principles that make use of the idea of a hybrid of expected and final welfare (Voorhoeve and Fleurbaey 2016), and for competing claims models and variants on these, whenever ex ante claims are part of the model [for discussion on these models, see Frick (2015), Horton (2017)]. Here I have focused on the particular example of the ex ante Pareto principle, but the implications for a wide range of principles are far-reaching.…”

Ethical Frameworks for Cybersecurity

“…Philosophers have tried to avoid these types of problems by providing more sophisticated formulations of both ex ante and ex post versions of contractualism. All appear to be vulnerable to counterexamples and, for this reasons, it has been argued that the Minimax Complaint view should be abandoned altogether when dealing with risk(Horton 2017).…”