Abstract
This article critically examines some of the inconsistency objections that have been put forward by John Broome, Larry Temkin and others against the so-called "person-affecting," or "person-based," restriction in normative ethics, including "extra people" problems and a version of the nonidentity problem from Kavka and Parfit. Certain Pareto principles and a version of the "mere addition paradox" are discussed along the way. The inconsistencies at issue can be avoided, it is argued, by situating the person-affecting intuition within a non-additive form of maximizing consequentialism – a theory which then competes with such additive, or aggregative, forms of maximizing consequentialism as "totalism" and "averagism."
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Roberts, M.A. Is the Person-Affecting Intuition Paradoxical?. Theory and Decision 55, 1–44 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:THEO.0000019052.80871.b3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:THEO.0000019052.80871.b3