But now suppose we can effect a change that will make the better off person worse off without making anyone else better off, and without making it the case that the formerly better off person is now worse off.
If we can effect a change, perhaps by transferring resources, that will make the worse off person better off and make the better off person worse off, provided the change does not bring it about that the formerly better off person is now worse off, the change will bring the people closer to being equally well off.
The Victorian vaccination legislation was part of an unfair, thoroughly class-based, coercive, and disciplinary healthcare and justice system: poor, working-class persons were subjected to the full force of the law while better-off persons were provided with safer vaccines and could easily avoid punishment if they did not comply.
"She could hang up her pots and pans tomorrow and license her brand, and the shareholders might be better off," the person close to her told me.
Still other philosophers have suggested principles that require agents to create additional wellbeing, including, when necessary, by bringing a better off person into existence in place of a nonidentical less well off person, but limit that obligation to the case where agents can substitute in the better off person for the less well off person on a one-to-one basis.
The two principles differ most importantly where an avoidable inequality of health can be eliminated, not by improving the health of the worse off person (or group), but only by reducing the health of the better off person (or group).
On the aggregative approach, it is immaterial whether we create additional (average or total) wellbeing (a) by creating additional wellbeing for a particular existing or future person or (b) by bringing a nonidentical but better off person into existence.
In the situation envisaged, FEO assigns priority to helping a better off person in a certain respect: enable the person to have the same prospects of competitive success as anyone else with the same native talent and ambition.
Perhaps the better off person has a nice house, and we can burn down the house costlessly, making him worse off, but without improving the condition of anyone else.
If a person's existence is unavoidably flawed, then the agent's only alternatives to bringing that person into the flawed existence are to bring no one into existence at all or to bring a different person – a nonidentical but better off person – into existence in place of the person whose existence is flawed.
