Patrick Williamson

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.

One prominent welfarist axiology, critical-level utilitarianism, says that individual lives must surpass a specified ‘critical level’ in order to make a positive contribution to the comparative status of a given population. In this article I develop a new dilemma for critical-level utilitarians. When comparatively evaluating populations composed of different species, critical-level utilitarians must decide whether the critical level is a universal threshold or whether the critical level is a species-relative threshold. I argue that both thresholds lead to a range of axiological puzzles and objections as yet undiscussed within the literature, and therefore conclude that critical-level utilitarianism should not be taken as a morally plausible welfarist axiology. I show that certain competitive formulations of critical range utilitarianism are subject to the argument too, and that further attempts to relativise critical levels to a particular group or category of welfare bearer are unsustainable.