 Answers to this question typically appeal to several related and sometimes conceptually unclear distinctions that are thought to be morally relevant. These include the aforementioned distinction between future and current costs and benefits, the distinction between identified and unidentified or statistical lives, and the distinction between currently existing and future persons. The impact of preventive interventions is more likely to be experienced in the future, while the impact of treatment interventions is typically experienced in the near term. Whether people should disvalue future benefits to themselves, relative to current benefits, is not clear. Because current beneficiaries are often identifiable and future beneficiaries typically are not, the differential valuing by temporality is often associated with the distinction between identified and statistical persons. The identified victim effect is the term given to the widely observed psychological phenomenon in which people have a greater inclination to assist (and avoid harming) persons and groups who are known by name or are otherwise identifiable than to assist (and avoid harming) persons and groups who will suffer (or already suffer) similar harm but are not (as yet) identifiable to them in any socially meaningful way. These unidentified persons are thus “merely” statistics or statistical lives (pp.1–2; Eyal et al. 2015; Jenni and Lowenstein 1997; Jonsen 1986; McKie and Richardson 2003; Small 2015).