UC San Diego

For any badly off person we consider, there could be someone who is much worse off. For example, suppose that Jane is the currently worst off person. Jane is so miserable that her life is worth not living. Nonetheless, one would be much worse off than Jane if one were as miserable as her at each time, but lived for much longer. Since there could be such persons who would live indefinitely longer than Jane, there could be persons who would be indefinitely worse off than Jane. I call such extremely badly off persons Priority Monsters. The possibility of Priority Monsters raises new and important challenges in the ethics of distribution, an area of ethics which addresses how we ought to distribute benefits and burdens across separate persons. The principal challenge I focus on is how to avoid the conclusion that, if such Priority Monsters existed, we would be morally required to benefit them, no matter how little we provide them, at the expense of doing much more good for others, like Jane, who are themselves significantly badly off. Most of us find this conclusion very hard to accept - surely if it were between sparing Jane of many years of misery and sparing a Priority Monster of a mild headache, we should do the former. Utilitarian principles of distribution say that we ought to maximize the overall sum of benefits. Egalitarian and prioritarian principles place special moral weight on achieving benefits for persons who are worse off. Many contemporary philosophers contend that the latter principles are more plausible than utilitarian principles. I argue that while utilitarian principles easily and naturally avoid implausible conclusions about Priority Monsters, egalitarian and prioritarian cannot plausibly avoid such conclusions. Utilitarian principles thus avoid a significant difficulty that these other principles face, and they might therefore be more plausible, overall, than their non-utilitarian rivals