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CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – Patrick Tomlin (Warwick University)

November 7 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Title: Killing vs Headaches: Wide Proportionality and Limited Aggregation

Abstract: Philosophers who have discussed ‘limited aggregation’ have focussed discussion on cases in which we must choose which of two groups to save – for example, whether we should save one person’s life, or save some enormous number of people from a mild headache. According to one influential view, which I call the Relevance View, we should save one person’s life in this case, since headaches are irrelevant to death. In this paper, I want to examine what this implies for a different set of cases – cases in which we might inflict harm on some in order to save others from harm. Translating the relevance view from ‘whom-to-save’ to ‘harming-to-save’ cases, I show, is not straightforward. We need to consider up to four different ‘relevance rules’, and to consider the relationships between them. I will further argue that considering the Relevance View in these cases reveals something important about two fundamental principles of preventive morality —  that the proportionality principle is logically prior to, and constrains the operation of, the necessity principle

Location: Edgecliffe G03

Details

Date:
November 7
Time:
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Event Category:

Venue

Edgecliffe 104