Partial Aggregation: What the People Think

Abstract

This article reports three empirical studies regarding partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics (total N = 417). We begin by documenting the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate partial aggregation views. Thereafter, we advance the literature along two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work by ascertaining which amongst existing versions of partial aggregation (localised vs. global) chimes more fully with moral common sense. Specifically, we document how judgments about ‘irrelevant goods’ (Kamm 1993) in tie-breaking cases are just as robust as the original aggregative/non-aggregative pair of judgments that constitute partial aggregation. Second, we conduct an experiment that pairs laypeople’s moral judgments in standard cases with their intuitions about the limits of permissible self-prioritisation. We investigate whether one prominent explanation of why irrelevant claims may not be aggregated (Voorhoeve’s ‘personal prerogative’ argument) can be said to underpin people’s intuitions about the (ir)relevance relation of claims in conflict cases. We close with a discussion of our findings’ import and highlight avenues for future research.