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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2009
Suppose the following: two groups of people require our aid but we can help only one group; there are more people in the first group than in the second group; every person in both groups has an equal claim on our aid; and we have a duty to help and no other special obligations or duties. I argue that there exists at least one fairness function, which is a function that measures the goodness of degrees of fairness, that implies that we should follow a procedure of proportional chances to determine which group to aid.
1 See Taurek, J. M., ‘Should the Numbers Count?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), pp. 293–316Google ScholarPubMed.
2 See Kamm, F. M., Morality, Mortality, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 114–19Google Scholar and Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 229–41Google Scholar.
3 F. M. Kamm, Morality, Mortality, pp. 114–19, offers several arguments in favour of proportional chances. Brock, Dan W., ‘Ethical Issues in Recipient Selection for Organ Transplantation’, Organ Substitution Technology: Ethical, Legal, and Public Policy Issues, ed. Mathieu, D., (Boulder, 1988), pp. 86–99Google Scholar, and Timmerman, Jens, ‘The Individualist Lottery: How People Count, but Not There Numbers’, Analysis 64 (2004), pp. 106–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explicitly endorse proportional chances.
4 See, for example, Brock, ‘Organ Transplantations’, pp. 86–99.
5 See Broome, John, Ethics out of Economics (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 111–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Kamm on Fairness’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998), pp. 955–61.
6 For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank John Broome, Kimberley Brownlee, Iwao Hirose, Christoph Ortner, and Geoff Sayre-McCord.
