Annie asked:

My ethics class recently read Thomson's "Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley Problem", Kagan's "The
Additive Fallacy" and Taurek's "Should the Numbers Count?" I'm writing a paper which will examine
the idea that, when making moral decisions or morally evaluating a situation, the numbers shouldn't
matter, suffering isn't additive, etc. Can you suggest any other readings which may be helpful, either
supporting or opposing the views in these articles? I wish to focus on Taurek's "Drug" scenario:
Taurek owns the only dose of a certain drug; one person needs the whole dose to live; five people
each need 1/5th of a dose to live; none of the six have any claim on the drug or connection to Taurek;
to whom should he give the drug? Taurek claims it's morally permissible to give the drug to the one. I
understand his reasoning yet still find it difficult to agree with Taurek, that five people dying is not a
worse outcome than one person dying.

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For a non-aggregating view that does require that the five people be saved in the drug case, check
out Tim Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other.

And for a good rebuttal of both Taurek's and Scanlon's non-aggregation, see Alastair Norcross,
"Contractualism and Aggregation http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~norcross/ContractualismAggregation.pdf,
Social Theory and PracticeVol. 28, No. 2, April 2002, available on his web site:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~norcross/Norcrosscv.html

Jonathan Ichikawa

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