I think the central trick is that you don’t aim at the ultimate good in public policy, just things like fairness, aggreegated life years and so on. You can decide that spending a certain amount of money will save X lives in road safety, or Y lives in medicine, and so on, without worrying that you might be saving the life of the next Hitler.
I think the central trick is that you don’t aim at the ultimate good in public policy, just things like fairness, aggreegated life years and so on. You can decide that spending a certain amount of money will save X lives in road safety, or Y lives in medicine, and so on, without worrying that you might be saving the life of the next Hitler.
My point still stands.
Maybe, but it doesn’t reflect back on the usefulness of c-ism as a fully fledged moral theory.
This discussion was about consequentialism as an everyday heuristic.