In Defence of the Priority View: A Response to Otsuka and Voorhoeve
| Abstract | In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present an argument against the so-called ‘Priority View’ of distribution.1 According to that view, as stated by Derek Parfit, ‘benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are’, by virtue of the fact that a person’s utility has ‘diminishing marginal moral importance’ the better off she is.2 Otsuka and Voorhoeve claim that, because this view fails to reflect a significant difference between the intrapersonal and the interpersonal, it should be rejected. Their initial counter-example (pp. 171–4) asks us to imagine a young adult who is told that she is going to develop a mobility-affecting condition and has a 50 per cent chance of developing each of the following. | |||||||||
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