Two ways to decide
Imagine you can only help one of two individuals. How do you choose? The text compares two ideas.
Magnitude Thesis: help whoever will be harmed more if they're not helped. What counts is the size of the harm, not the species.
Special Status Thesis: some individuals have a "special status," like a wild card. They should come first even when their harm is smaller.
Versions of special status
- Full version: whoever has special status always comes first, no matter how much the other one suffers.
- Version with a limit: whoever has special status comes first, unless the other one's suffering goes past a certain point.
In both versions, you sometimes have to help the one who would suffer less. Special status is usually given to humans, or to the smartest beings.
How to tell if this is fair: the veil of ignorance
The author uses a famous test, inspired by the philosophers John Harsanyi and John Rawls. Imagine you're about to be born, but you don't know who you'll be. You could be anyone affected by a rule: a human, a pig, a chicken.
Now choose the rules of the world. The idea is: whatever you'd choose without knowing who you'll be is what's fair.
Without knowing who you'd be, would you accept a rule that puts a small pain of a "special" being above a huge pain of your own? Probably not. You'd want the size of the suffering to count.
What about those who don't understand justice?
Some people say this test only applies to those who have a sense of justice. The author answers that, if that were true, babies and children would be left out too, and that's not acceptable.
In short
- The Magnitude Thesis looks at the size of the harm.
- The Special Status Thesis gives priority to some, even when they suffer less.
- In the veil of ignorance test, the Magnitude Thesis is the fair choice.