Justification to other people › The difficulty of aggregation

An important pressure on the view concerns numbers. If objections are assessed from individual standpoints, how should several people's comparable claims affect a decision? And could enough minor benefits justify imposing a severe injury on one person? These are distinct questions. Answering one does not automatically answer the other.

Scanlon's discussion resists aggregating small benefits across many people to outweigh one person's much more serious burden. The structure protects an individual's claim from being submerged in a sum of advantages. It does not follow that the number of people with comparable claims is always irrelevant. The book considers how numbers can matter within the individualist structure.

A useful test is to distinguish comparable claims from a combination of very different burdens. Saving several people rather than one, where the competing claims are otherwise alike, raises one kind of issue. Inflicting a grave injury so that many people can avoid minor inconvenience raises another. Calling both cases “one against many” would conceal what needs to be justified.

These questions reveal work the theory must do. A general commitment to justification to each person is not yet a complete account of permissible trade-offs. A reader should examine the particular argument about numbers, rather than assume that contractualism either prohibits every collective benefit or reproduces a calculation of total welfare under another name.