Risking Life and Limb: How to Discount Harms by Their Improbability

Abstract

This chapter argues that complaints against suffering harm should be discounted by the chance that someone—rather than the chances that particular individuals—would suffer harm. The case, after such discounting, for preventing the greater harm is not undermined by the mere fact of ignorance of the identity of who would suffer harm. Even when ignorance of a victim’s identity is explained by the presence of objective and indeterministic risks of harm, the presence of such risks hardly undermines the case for preventing the greater harm. It fails to undermine this case even when the victim’s identity is, in principle, unknowable, because there is no fact of the matter who he would be, given the openness of counterfactuals. When, moreover, neither the number nor the identity (or identities) of wouldbe victim(s) is known, that fact does not undermine the case for preventing the greatest expected harm rather than exhibiting a preference for identified victims.