Relevant Claims and Causal Ramifications

I develop a new argument against a popular family of views in ethics concerning claims aggregation: those views according to which agents ought to maximise the satisfaction of relevant claims upon their conduct. A claim is said to be relevant if it is sufficiently strong compared to those claims with which it competes. The core of the argument goes as follows. In nearly all of our decisions, we change which presently existing persons are spared severe harms such as painful and premature death. In light of this fact, those who believe in maximising relevant claim satisfaction must nearly always ignore minor claims below the threshold of ‘death relevance’. This result, I suggest, is deeply implausible. In the latter half of the paper I articulate and ultimately reject five different avenues of response.