How to Assess Claims in Multiple‐Option Choice Sets

Particular persons have claims against being made worse off than they could have been.The literature, however, has focused primarily on only two-option cases; yet, these cases fail to capture all of the morally relevant factors, especially when a person's existence is in question.This paper explores how to assess claims in multiple-option choice sets.We scrutinize the only extant proposal, offered by Michael Otsuka, which we call the Weakening View.In light of its problems, we develop an alternative: the Combining View.The Weakening View holds that a person's claim against a loss of well-being relative to one distribution is weakened by the availability of further alternatives relative to which the person gains well-being.By contrast, our view holds that a person has an overall claim for or against a certain distribution relative to the whole option set, where overall claims are second-order functions of the different pairwise claims.Finally, we defend the Combining View by exploring its implications for the impact of a person's possible non-existence on their overall claims, and we develop a proposal for how the number of distributions relative to which a person gains or loses welfare influences the strength of their overall claims.According to a common line of thought, particular persons have claims against being made worse off than they could have been; and these claims generate moral reasons to not bring about a distribution which has this feature.The idea that claims are morally relevant is closely associated with T. M. Scanlon's Contractualism, 1 but it is a feature of many different views in moral theory.For instance, most deontologists believe that we should take people's claims into account; we have moral duties to satisfy people's claims, and we wrong them when we neglect their claims.Even consequentialists, who standardly deny that claims matter in themselves, may accept that the talk of claims tracks what is morally relevant: the gains and losses of individual people.Surprisingly, the relevant literature focuses almost exclusively on choice sets with only two options and fixed persons. 2 Yet, when we focus only on such cases, we may fail to capture all of the morally relevant factors.In more complex cases, a person may, for example, lose well-being in one

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• The Dual Reason-Giving Force of Welfare

  Open Access•Jonas Harney•Utilitas•2026

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