Aggregative moral theories, it is said, do not respect the separateness of persons because they allow severe burdens on one person to be outweighed by mild benefits to each member of a large group of people. There are many alternatives to aggregative moral theories that respect the separateness of persons, among them various MiniMax Complaints (MC). MC holds that we ought to choose the action that minimizes the maximal complaint among all those affected.

MC theories, however, struggle with risk imposition. When each of a large number of people is exposed to a small risk, it may be exceedingly likely that at least one of them will be harmed. However, each person presumably only has a weak complaint, because their individual risk to be harmed is low. MC may thus direct us to rather impose risks of harm than to harm identified individuals, even though we can expect more people to be harmed as a result. This paper presents an approach, Principle MC, that preserves the non-aggregative nature of MC while yielding plausible verdicts in cases involving identified and statistical lives by focusing on principles of risk imposition instead of focusing on individual acts that impose risks.