Saving Lives: For the Best Outcome?

In this article, I critique a moral argument developed in Frances Kamm’s Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. The argument, which I label the Best Outcome Argument, aims to criticize the Taurekian idea that it is not worse if more people die than if fewer do in conflict situations, where it is hard to distinguish individuals from one another solely by reference to the relative strength of their claims. I argue that the Best Outcome Argument is flawed for three reasons: (1) the symmetry feature defined by the impartiality principle holds only in a limited class of conflict situations; (2) individuals should be treated in a consistent way throughout the whole process of reasoning; (3) comparative evaluations gained in different contexts, at least in some cases, cannot be used in one and the same argument.