The goodness or badness of what I do to you hangs on many things not involved in the calculus of thought experiments: what, for example, it does to me as a spiritual, emotional, cognitive, and physical whole, to be the perpetrator (for example, brutal treatment of animals also brutalises us), and what happens to the world at large in which we are inevitably embedded (a world in which doctors can’t be trusted not to cannibalise you for spare parts) – neither of which considerations can be ultimately isolated from one another or from the impact on the victim.
