So, if I understand you correctly: * Death is so bad that you would never accept one extra death, whatever the compensating gains. * Torture is so bad that you would never accept one extra instance of torture, whatever the compensating gains. What do you do when you're in the unfortunate position of having to choose between deaths and tortures? E.g., some crazed criminal has set up an infernal machine that will either torture M people or kill N people, it's boobytrapped so that if you try to break it or otherwise stop it doing one of those it will torture M+N people and then kill them, but you do have the option to flip the switch from "torture" to "death" or vice versa. Your comment above suggests you wouldn't accept any extra torture even to save multiple lives; since you say that preventing torture is (only) almost as important to you as preventing death, I guess you also wouldn't accept any extra deaths even to prevent multiple tortures. But that leaves you in a situation where, e.g., you wouldn't switch from 1000 tortures to 1 death, nor from 1000 deaths to 1 torture. That's pretty counterintuitive, to say the least. Here's one striking consequence: suppose you have a room with two such machines (operating on completely disjoint sets of people). One is currently set to "1000 tortures" (other option: 1 death) and the other to "1000 deaths" (other option: 1 torture). It seems like you have to either (1) endorse leaving them set that way even though switching both switches takes you from 1000D+1000T to 1D+1T, or (2) endorse at least one of the individual switchings even though it trades off torture against death, or (3) say that it's wrong to switch either switch alone but right to switch both, even though the two switches affect completely different people. All of those seem to me like very painful bullets to bite. Oh, but in real life you would never have to make such an artificial choice between torture and death! Really? If permitting versus prohibiting