Commentator: Katharina Berndt

Abstract

According to a common intuition, we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. According to a less common intuition, we should sometimes save identified lives even at the expense of saving a greater number of statistical lives. I defend a principled way of justifying both intuitions, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of survival chances. I identify four desiderata that, I contend, any such justification should satisfy, and explain how my account meets these desiderata, unlike some previous accounts.