People are often more likely to accept risky monetary gambles with positive expected values when the gambles will be played more than once. We investigated whether this distinction between single-play and multiple-play gambles extends to medical treatments for individual patients and groups of patients. Resident physicians and medical students (n = 69) and undergraduates (n = 99) ranked 9 different flu shots and a no-flu-shot option in 1 of 4 combinations of perspective (individual patient vs. group of 1000 patients) and uncertainty frame (probability vs. frequency). The rank of the no-flu-shot option (a measure of preference for treatment vs. no treatment) was not significantly related to perspective or participant population. The main effect of uncertainty frame and the interaction between perspective and uncertainty frame approached significance (0.1 > p > 0.05), with the no-flu-shot option faring particularly poorly (treatment faring particularly well) when decisions about many patients were based on frequency information. Undergraduate participants believed that the no-flu-shot option would be less attractive (treatment would be more attractive) in decisions about many patients, but these intuitions were inconsistent with the actual ranks. These results and those of other studies suggest that medical treatments for individuals and groups are not analogous to single-play and multiple-play monetary gambles, perhaps because many people are unwilling to aggregate treatment outcomes over patients in the same way that they would compute net gains or losses over monetary gambles.

In considering moral dilemmas, people often judge the acceptability of exchanging individuals’ interests, rights, and even lives. Here we investigate the related, but often overlooked, question of how people decide who to sacrifice in a moral dilemma. In three experiments (total N = 558), we provide evidence that these decisions often depend on the feeling that certain people are fungible and interchangeable with one another, and that one factor that leads people to be viewed this way is shared nationality. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read vignettes in which three individuals’ lives could be saved by sacrificing another person. When the individuals were characterized by their nationalities, participants chose to save the three endangered people by sacrificing someone who shared their nationality, rather than sacrificing someone from a different nationality. Participants do not show similar preferences, though, when individuals were characterized by their age or month of birth. In Experiment 3, we replicated the effect of nationality on participant’s decisions about who to sacrifice, and also found that they did not show a comparable preference in a closely matched vignette in which lives were not exchanged. This suggests that the effect of nationality on decisions of who to sacrifice may be specific to judgments about exchanges of lives.

While autonomy arguments provide a compelling foundation for free speech, they also support individual privacy rights. Considering how speech and privacy may be justified, I will argue that the speech necessary for self-government does not need to include details that would violate privacy rights. Additionally, I will argue that if viewed as a kind of intangible property right, informational privacy should limit speech and expression in a range of cases. In a world where we have an overabundance of content to consume, much of which could be called “information pollution,” and where there are numerous platforms to broadcast one’s expressions, it is increasingly difficult to maintain that speech should trump privacy.

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit takes issue with Bernard Williams’ view of the relation between love and identity. Williams thought that, in a world where there were several co-existing replicas of one’s beloved, our current conception of love would begin to crumble. Parfit agrees with Williams in the branching case of replication, but thought that, where replication takes a non-branching form, our ordinary view of love would remain intact. I believe Parfit arrives at this conclusion because he has not fully appreciated the degree to which Williams’ claim is primarily about a view of love rather than one of identity.