Abstract

Suppose the following: Two groups of people require our aid but we can help only one group; there are more people in the first group than the second group; every person in both groups has an equal claim on our aid; and we have a duty to help and no other special obligations or duties. I argue that there exists at least one fairness function, which is a function that measures the goodness of degrees of fairness, that implies that we should follow a procedure of proportional chances to determine which group to aid.