If harm aggregates less-than-linearly in general, then the difference between the harm caused by 6271 murders and that caused by 6270 is less than the difference between the harm caused by one murder and that caused by zero. That is, it is worse to put a dust mote in someone’s eye if no one else has one, than it is if lots of other people have one.
If relative utility is as nonlocal as that, it’s entirely incalculable anyway. No one has any idea of how many beings are in the universe. It may be that murdering a few thousand people barely registers as harm, because eight trillion zarquons are murdered every second in Galaxy NQL-1193. However, Coca-Cola is relatively rare in the universe, so a marginal gain of one Coca-Cola is liable to be a far more weighty issue than a marginal loss of a few thousand individuals.
If harm aggregates less-than-linearly in general, then the difference between the harm caused by 6271 murders and that caused by 6270 is less than the difference between the harm caused by one murder and that caused by zero. That is, it is worse to put a dust mote in someone’s eye if no one else has one, than it is if lots of other people have one.
If relative utility is as nonlocal as that, it’s entirely incalculable anyway. No one has any idea of how many beings are in the universe. It may be that murdering a few thousand people barely registers as harm, because eight trillion zarquons are murdered every second in Galaxy NQL-1193. However, Coca-Cola is relatively rare in the universe, so a marginal gain of one Coca-Cola is liable to be a far more weighty issue than a marginal loss of a few thousand individuals.
(This example is deliberately ridiculous.)