Re:Importance (Score 2, Interesting)

Just to take this a little more seriously than is due it,

Is there a formal designation for the type of argument which asserts the undesirability of a given course of action on the basis of its consumption of effort/resources from an imagined "total pool of potential expended effort/resources," as it were?

It seems that there should be one. I encounter it rather often. I'm sure someone's attributed a name to it.

For example, as an argument against animal rights: "How can you spend all your time worrying about how the animals are doing, when there are children starving to death in Africa and homeless people dying on the street?

It's very common as a popular attack on perceived productive courses of action or topics of discourse and there's really no substance to the argument beyond the basic notion that any action aside from one which achieves maximum utilitarian gain is morally defective.