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Articles

The Impossibility of Maximizing Good Consequences

Lawrence Crocker on lotteries, reasonable actions, and weird outliers.

Take the last day I gave a lecture on ethical theory. I was in the classroom at the scheduled time. I was not on my office computer entering the winning number in an online lottery. As a result, I did not receive a fortune to distribute to the worthiest of charities. I had naïvely thought that I probably did the right thing in meeting my class on time.

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