Dale Dorsey (UC San Diego, Philosophy) has posted Headaches, Lives, and Value on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Consider the following variation on a thought experiment given by Scanlon.
Suppose that Jones has suffered an accident in the transmitter room of a television station. Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm, and we cannot rescue him without turning off the transmitter for fifteen minutes. A World Cup match is in progress, watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour. Jones’s injury will get significantly worse if we wait, leading eventually to his death. Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over?
Scanlon’s solution to examples like this is to deny aggregation. (Scanlon’s original case is somewhat different, I will discuss it later in the paper.) When there is a big burden that is to be borne by a single individual for the benefit of many minor burdens, it is illegitimate to aggregate these minor burdens in an effort to outweigh the big bad (in this case, death).