Abstract: When there are two groups of people with claims for your assistance and you can only help one of them, which group ought you to choose?  The “Relevance View” offers plausible guidance on how to weigh up these competing claims.  It allows weak claims to aggregate to outweigh a stronger claim in some cases, while ruling out aggregation in others.  For example, no number of claims for headache relief can outweigh a claim for life-saving medical treatment, because a headache claim is so much weaker than a life claim as to be irrelevant to it.  The idea of relevance as a limit on aggregation has so far only been explored in a narrow set of cases: cases where the agent’s decision has no effect on the identities of the people who come to exist.  I ask whether the Relevance View might have application outside this narrow domain, articulating and providing support for a version of the view that applies to choices about which of two possible populations to bring into existence.

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