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theunitofcaring:

Does this actually seem true to you? If I tell you “I’m torturing an animal in my apartment,” do you go “well, if there are no other animals being tortured anywhere in the world, then that’s really terrible! But there are some, so it’s probably not as terrible. Let me go check how many animals are being tortured.”

(a minute later)

“Oh, like ten billion. In that case you’re not doing anything morally bad, carry on.”

I can’t see why a person’s suffering would be less morally significant depending on how many other people are suffering. And as a general principle, arbitrarily bounding variables because you’re distressed by their behavior at the limits seems risky.  

Without linear aggregation it becomes impossible to make moral decisions in an isolated corner of the universe without, like, trying to find out how big the rest of it is first. Linear aggregation says, if the universe has two halves, and there’s no way for them to interact, and people take some actions in one of them that would be moral if that half was the whole universe, and some other people do the same in the the other half, then all those actions, considered in aggregate, are still moral.