> I have a hard time with that. How can merely aggregating a bunch of people together create a moral justification that doesn't exist otherwise? What's the basi

> I have a hard time with that. How can merely aggregating a bunch of people together create a moral justification that doesn't exist otherwise? What's the basis for saying that this is so? I tried to provide an explanation in my comment, but it must not have been very clear. The answer will depend on one's reason for thinking that individual action was immoral. Often, an otherwise immoral act can nonetheless be justified through extrinsic circumstances. For example, assume that killing is generally wrong. But it can be justified if you have the proper level of confidence that the victim himself is a so-far-unpunished murderer and if killing him after a public trial in which his crime is exposed would send a morally important message. (I think these are fairly representative of the purported justifications for the death penalty.) But there is a problem: an individual acting alone is virtually never in a position to satisfy these criteria. It takes a lot of people acting together to satisfy them--a government.