Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

by Sheri Fink

Other philosophers have gone further afield, arguing that potentially lifesaving resources should be allocated randomly, because everyone deserves an equal chance to survive, and because it is dangerous to endow groups of people with the power to assign who lives and who dies. This argument sparked a debate that played out in the pages of philosophy journals for a decade beginning in the late 1970s. Proponents rejected the popular idea that the number of lives saved should be a central consideration when prioritizing rescues. The writer of an influential paper, John M. Taurek, also argued that suffering is not cumulative between individuals—for example, that it is impossible to add up the suffering of a large number of people with minor headaches to equal the suffering of a single person with a migraine, as a utilitarian might do.