Yeah, good points. I think for exactly these reasons it is important that each (sub-)cause is included in not only one but several partial rankings. However, that ranking needn’t be a total ranking, it could be a partial ranking itself. E.g. one partial ranking is ‘present people < farmed animals’ and another one is ‘farmed animals < wild animals’. From these, we could infer (by transitivity of “<”) that ‘present people < wild animals’, which already gets us closer to a total ranking. So I think one way that a partial ranking of (sub-)causes can help determining a total ranking—and hence the ‘best cause’ overall—is if there are several overlapping partial rankings.
(By the way, just in case you didn’t see that one, I had written this other reply to your previous comment—no need to answer it, but to make sure you didn’t overlook it since I wrote two separate replies.)
Yeah, good points. I think for exactly these reasons it is important that each (sub-)cause is included in not only one but several partial rankings. However, that ranking needn’t be a total ranking, it could be a partial ranking itself. E.g. one partial ranking is ‘present people < farmed animals’ and another one is ‘farmed animals < wild animals’. From these, we could infer (by transitivity of “<”) that ‘present people < wild animals’, which already gets us closer to a total ranking. So I think one way that a partial ranking of (sub-)causes can help determining a total ranking—and hence the ‘best cause’ overall—is if there are several overlapping partial rankings.
(By the way, just in case you didn’t see that one, I had written this other reply to your previous comment—no need to answer it, but to make sure you didn’t overlook it since I wrote two separate replies.)