 One contractualist response is to bite the bullet, and accept that coin tossing is the right answer. Many contractualists, however, wish to capture the intuition that you ought to save the five. Recall that an agent’s reason for rejecting a principle can be based, not on its effect on her well-being, but on what that principle says about her or how it treats her. Imagine one of the five swimmers on the first rock arguing as follows: “Coin tossing is clearly the right principle if there is one person on each rock, as it balances their competing reasons. If you apply the same principle when there are five on this rock, you are saying it makes no difference that there are five rather than one. So you are acting exactly as if I wasn’t here, facing this life and death situation. A principle that allows you—in effect—to ignore my plight in this way doesn’t show respect for me. If there were one person on each rock, their claims to be rescued would cancel out. So we then look to see whether there are other people on either rock. There are several such people, and I am one of them. My claim to be rescued remains un-trumped. So you should rescue the five.” (For a critique of this argument, see Otsuka 2001.)