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<p class="MsoNormal">A Philosophy Colloquium will be held on <b>Friday, September 25, 2015</b> at
<b>3:30 p.m.</b> in <b>HH 373. </b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><a href="http://www.queensu.ca/philosophy/people/faculty/kumar-rahul">Rahul Kumar</a><o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Queen’s University<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Saving Lives and Statistical Deaths<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Kantian contractualists, like Rawls and Scanlon, claim that aggregate benefit and burden, the currency of consequentialist reasoning, has no role to play in determining what it is morally permissible for a person to do. Call this the ‘irrelevance<i>
</i>thesis’. Whether it is remotely plausible has been widely discussed. But the discussion has largely focused on highly idealized cases, in which we face a choice of benefitting a few or a great many, and we also know, with certainty, what the implications
are of different choices for the distribution of benefits and burdens across the population in question. In this paper, I take up a distinct, but related challenge to the irrelevance thesis: that when we make the more realistic assumption that all we know
is the likelihood, or probability, of any given person ending up better or worse off as a result of a choice, consequentialist reasoning about what morality requires we choose starts to look like the only game in town. I argue that this challenge can be met,
but doing so requires re-thinking how contractualism is widely understood. <o:p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/philosophy/events">https://uwaterloo.ca/philosophy/events</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><img border="0" width="653" height="845" id="Picture_x0020_1" src="cid:image001.jpg@01D0F515.BFC85540"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Vicki Brett</b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Hobo Std""><br>
</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt">Undergraduate Coordinator<br>
Philosophy Department – HH 365<br>
200 University Avenue W.</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Caflisch Script Pro Regular""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt">Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt">Tel: 519-888-4567 x32449<br>
<a href="mailto:vbrett@uwaterloo.ca">vbrett@uwaterloo.ca</a></span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-size:9.0pt"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt"><br>
</span><br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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