The Disrespectfulness of Weighted Survival Lotteries

Adams, Joseph

Abstract

If we can save the lives of only one of multiple groups of people, we might be inclined simply to save whichever group is largest. We may worry, though, that automatically saving the largest group fails to take each saveable individual sufficiently into account, offering some of these individuals no chance at all of being rescued. Still wanting to give larger groups higher chances of survival, we may then say that we ought to employ a proportionally weighted lottery to determine which group to save. In this paper, I argue that this would be a mistake. Given the most plausible way of specifying it, the weighted-lottery view itself fails to treat each saveable individual with equal moral respect.

Citation

Adams, J. (2020). The Disrespectfulness of Weighted Survival Lotteries. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 120(3), 395-404. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoaa004

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 27, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Apr 7, 2021
• Publication Date: 2020-10
• Deposit Date: Feb 6, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 20, 2020
• Journal: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
• Print ISSN: 0066-7374
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-9264
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 120
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 395-404
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoaa004
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3910280
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article/120/3/395/5820558