Moral aggregation

by Hirose, Iwao

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Full title :Moral aggregation / Iwao Hirose.

Summary

Aggregation is one of the fundamental features of utilitarianism and other forms of axiological theories, permitting the trade-off of morally relevant factors between different individuals. It is also a feature that critics of utilitarianism such as John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and T. M. Scanlon condemn. Yet the basic features of aggregation are not understood properly. This book elucidates the theoretical structure and scope of interpersonal and intra-personal aggregation in ethics and defends a form of aggregation, formal aggregation, as distinguished from substantive aggregation of utilitarianism. Substantive aggregation combines the morally relevant factors that are determined prior to, and independently of, aggregative process, and identifies the goal to be pursued. In contrast, formal aggregation represents the overall ethical judgment in terms of individuals' morally relevant factors and hence clarifies a structure of our ethical thinking. Formal aggregation is a powerful analytical tool, enabling us to resolve a variety of outstanding problems arising from the conventional understanding of aggregation, including the Number Problem concerning the moral relevance of the number of individuals in our moral reasoning. The result is a new theoretical framework that can satisfy the demands of both defenders and critics of conventional form of aggregation.