Aggregating Harms — Should We Kill to Avoid Headaches?

Abstract: It is plausible to claim that it is morally worse to kill an innocent person than to give any number of people a mild one‐hour headache. Alaistar Norcross has argued that consequentialists, at least, should reject this claim. According to him, any harm that can befall a person can be morally outweighed by a sufficient number of very small harms. He gives a general argument for this view, and tries to show, by means of an argument from analogy, that it is less counter‐intuitive than it appears. I show that his main argument relies on a false assumption, and argue that the purported analogy is dubious.