On the moral notions of aggregation and distribution

Abstract

Moral aggregation, which is the combination of morally relevant features (like, for example, well-being) of different people, represented by a numerical value, is present in many contemporary moral theories. Aggregative theories define the morality of actions based on a comparison between the aggregate values of different states of affairs brought by the actions. In this paper, it’ll be argued that aggregation is undesirable for moral theories because it conflicts with important moral ideas like just distribution and the separateness of persons. Not only utilitarianism, but also aggregative theories that care about distribution, such as teleological egalitarianism and prioritarianism have this problem. The suggestion, at the end, is that a moral theory based on the notion of moral justification can deal with those problems by granting adequate importance to the separateness of persons; creating such a theory, though, involves eliminating or at least severely limiting the role moral aggregation plays in morality. The goals of the paper are arguing against moral aggregation and for a specific non-aggregative theory, moral contractualism.