Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Person-Affecting Restriction and
Non-Identity Problem
1 Introduction
I will now turn to the second assumption that the Prior Existence View
needs in order to be a coherent utilitarian view on the question across
which entities one ought to aggregate welfare. This is the assumption
that what matters in the evaluation of outcomes are harms and benefits
to sentient beings rather than the quantity of welfare as such. This partic-
ular view about what matters in the evaluation of outcomes is known as
the Person-Affecting Restriction. It has been introduced in Chapter 2. As
explained, unlike the Impersonal View, which evaluates outcomes solely
on their intrinsic aspects, i.e. the quantity of welfare that they contain,
the Person-Affecting Restriction evaluates outcomes in a comparative
way. The Person-Affecting Restriction evaluates outcomes in terms of
the harms and benefits that they entail. In order to determine the harms
and benefits an outcome contains, the outcome must be compared to
one or more other possible outcomes. In order to determine which
outcome yields most net benefits, it matters, for instance, which people
exist in each outcome and whether they would have existed in the other
outcome as well.
The major challenge to the Person-Affecting Restriction is the fact that
in some cases the outcome containing the most welfare and that at first
glance seems to be the most beneficial does in fact not involve a benefit to
any particular being. It is a challenge for the Person-Affecting Restriction
how to deal with those cases. If what one does has implications for who
will exist, different beings exist in different outcomes. In those cases,
when no particular person exists in both outcomes, it seems impossible
to say that the better outcome, i.e. the outcome that contains more
welfare, is better for any particular person. Centrally, the persons that
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