Kirsten Mann

In this critical commentary, we assess Theron Pummer’s attempt in The Rules of Rescue to reconcile the idea that the numbers matter when it comes to deciding who to save from harm, with the rejection of unfettered aggregation. We conclude that the task of reconciling individualist permitting reasons and the partial aggregation of requiring reasons with each other and with the overall account is more extensive than Pummer suggests. Further, we argue that while individualist permitting reasons are an interesting and potentially very constructive contribution to the non-consequentialist discussion of our duties to assist, more must be done to establish their plausibility.

The Relevance View, exemplified by Alex Voorhoeve's Aggregate Relevant Claims, has considerable appeal. It accommodates our reluctance to aggregate weak claims in canonical cases like Life for Headaches, while permitting aggregation of claims in a range of other cases. But it has been the target of significant criticism. In an important recent paper, Patrick Tomlin argues that the view suffers from failures of internal logic, violating plausible consistency constraints and generating incoherent combinations of verdicts on cases. And in cases resembling real-world healthcare allocation problems, Tomlin argues that the view offers no guidance at all. In response, I argue that the internal logic of the Relevance View is sound, and the view's core principles, suitably clarified, support a significant extension of the view beyond the simple cases to which it is typically applied.

In cases where the claims of different groups of people compete, the Relevance View occupies a middle ground between aggregation and nonaggregation. It allows weaker claims to aggregate to outweigh a stronger claim just when the competing claims, compared pairwise, are sufficiently close in strength. The view has strong intuitive appeal when applied to simple binary choices, but I argue that attempts to extend it to nonbinary choices have been unsuccessful. I propose a new extension of the Relevance View to nonbinary choices based on a “binary contrastive” account of the moral reasons that obtain in the cases of interest.