Daniel Munoz (University of North Carolina): 'Caring Who'
Over the last 30 years, a number of influential arguments in ethics have invoked the principle of Outcome Anonymity, which holds that two outcomes are equally good if they feature the same distribution of welfare, differing only in who is at which position in the distribution. This principle underlies Kamm’s and Barnett’s arguments for aggregation, Nebel’s and Dreier’s objections to person-affecting principles, Broome’s ‘same number addition theorem’, and Blessenohl’s objection to risk-weighted contractualism. Outcome Anonymity is usually presented as a minimal requirement of impartiality. I argue that it is not. Outcome Anonymity forbids something more than being partial: it forbids caring who is who. This concept of ‘caring who’ reveals lines of resistance to the above arguments, and I argue that it is not Outcome Anonymity but a weaker principle—what economists call simply ‘Anonymity’—that is the essence of being impartial.
