ABSTRACT
There are, indeed, specific principles of an aggregative kind but these take the form of drawing attention to certain types of consequences which are always relevant to aggregative judgements. Two of these principles have already been noticed in earlier chapters. In Chapter VI, I noted that rule-based justice and justice as the fulfilment of expectations have an aggregative justification (VI.3.A.) and in Chapter VIII I looked at aggregative justifications for freedom defined as the absence of certain kinds of grievance (VIII.1.C.) and the absence of certain kinds of restraint VIII.3.A.). These are clearly only partial aggregative arguments because they make a selection from all wants.1 Thus, as part of an attempt to decide whether something was justified on aggregative grounds one might, in examining all the wants involved, have to weigh up on one side its fulfilling an expectation and on the other side its diminishing negative freedom. But these two considerations are not distinct ‘aggregative principles’ (in the sense that justice as desert is a distinct ‘distributive principle’) because they can be brought together within the general aggregative principle
1 In VIII.1.B. I also considered a definition of ‘freedom’ as want-satisfaction that would make the principle of maximizing freedom equivalent to the maximizing form of the general aggregative principle. So this too is not a kind of aggregative principle.
