It will be unhelpful at that point to insist that these others are equally deserving. It’s true that the lives of those who get the opportunities aren’t worth more than the lives of those who don’t. But this is not, to repeat the point, because we have some scale of human worth on which we have weighed them and judged them equivalent. It is because there is no such scale. True, then, that the lives of the less successful are not less worthy. But not because they are as worthy or more worthy. There is simply no sensible way of comparing the worth of human lives.
