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The Relevance View: Defended and Extended

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2020

Kirsten Mann Open the ORCID record for Kirsten Mann [Opens in a new window]
Kirsten Mann*
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The Australian National University
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Abstract

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 (where one person's claim to life-saving treatment competes with millions of claims for headache relief), 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.

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Utilitas , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 101 - 110
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Tomlin, Patrick introduces the term ‘Relevance View’ in On Limited Aggregation, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 45 (2017): 232–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Notable presentations of the view include Scanlon, Thomas, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 229–41Google Scholar; Kamm, Frances, Morality, Mortality, I: Death and Whom to Save From It (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 144–95Google Scholar; Lefkowitz, David, On the Concept of a Morally Relevant Harm, Utilitas, 20 (2008): 409–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Voorhoeve, Alex, How Should We Aggregate Competing Claims?, Ethics, 125 (2014): 64–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Norcross, Alastair, Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 26 (1997): 135–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Voorhoeve, p. 66.

4 Tomlin, On Limited Aggregation.

5 See e.g. Tadros, Victor, Localized Restricted Aggregation, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, 5 (2019): 171–204Google Scholar; van Gils, Aart and Tomlin, Patrick, Relevance Rides Again?, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, 6 (2020), 221–56Google Scholar; Korbinian Rüger, Aggregation with Constraints, Utilitas; and Bastian Steuwer, Aggregation, Balancing, and Respect for the Claims of Individuals, Utilitas.

6 Horton, Joe, Always Aggregate, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 46 (2018): 160–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Voorhoeve, p. 66.

8 Tomlin, p. 239.

9 Tomlin, p. 239.

10 Tomlin, p. 258.

11 Tomlin, p. 241.

12 Tomlin, p. 241.

13 Tomlin, p. 242.

14 Tomlin, p. 242.

15 Tomlin, p. 244.

16 Voorhoeve (p. 79) employs this strategy in responding to the charge that ARC violates basic contraction consistency, drawing on Broome's, John Weighing Goods (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), ch. 5Google Scholar.

17 Tadros (p. 187) makes a similar observation with respect to transitivity.

18 Note that this is not the standard meaning of strong and weak dominance; the terminology is used here to emphasise the structural parallels with my discussion of Equal Consideration.

19 A similar response could be given to Horton's argument in Always Aggregate. Horton appeals to a principle similar to strong dominance to argue that all ‘partially aggregative’ views must have implausible implications in cases involving heterogeneous groups of claims.

20 Tomlin, p. 253.

21 Tomlin, p. 254.

22 Tomlin, p. 255. Note this is a simplified version of Tomlin's case.

23 Tomlin discusses two variants of Relevance View (subcompetitions) (pp. 255–56), but under the simplified example discussed here, both yield the same verdict.

24 Tomlin, pp. 256–57.

25 See Brown, Campbell, Is Close Enough Good Enough?, Economics and Philosophy, 36 (2020): 29–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a broader discussion of possible extensions of the Relevance View to non-binary choices among options.

26 I have not distinguished options that are the same but for the identities of the group members whose claims are satisfied.

27 For comments and discussion, I am grateful to Christian Barry, John Cusbert, Alan Hájek, Seth Lazar, Chad Lee-Stronach, Thomas Schmidt, Katie Steele, Nicholas Southwood, Patrick Tomlin, Alex Voorhoeve, Shang Long Yeo, participants at the 2019 ANU-Humboldt-Princeton Summer Institute on Practical Normativity, and an anonymous Utilitas reviewer. My research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.