I don't know enough about these situations to comment on them. In isolation, a non-zero amount of suffering and death is obviously worse than none. But the world isn't an isolated bubble like that. When you consider everything in its totality, it's no longer so obvious what the correct objective should be, and that's with the assumption that we can even even devise a measurable score for any of these objectives. Do we care for a lower bound on everyone's quality of life? Do we want to maximize some quality of life average or total? Do we want to maximize the duration of human existence? Who is this "everyone"? Everyone alive today? Everyone who will ever exist? Do we give the same weight to every person? Or should we use some discounted weighting so that present humans get higher priority than future humans? Or should we put a cap on how much of our collective resources we can allocate to any given individual?
