ABSTRACT

Even if the most likely version of the survival lottery in terms of present medical technology would have to be confined to the dying, and the more fanciful but more economical re-conditioning lottery is still science-fictionally futuristic, we should be prepared to face up to the lessons that consideration of such possibilities can teach. In 1939 British Intelligence obtained through the Polish Secret Service a copy of the German cypher machine ‘Enigma’. Although personal distance does not give us a way of morally distinguishing the indirect infliction of harm from more ‘personal’ harmful involvement with our fellows, in all the cases we have been considering probability plays an important role. Carolyn Morillo has suggested that we call the distancing effect occasioned by our uncertainty about the precise consequences of rival policies ‘probability distance’.