Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Restriction is focused on harms and benefits to sentient beings. It seems
that, in the case of woman B, delaying conception would not benefit
anybody. After all, there is no particular being made better off by having
a different baby, or so it seems. Hence, it seems that the Person-Affecting
Restriction would require that woman A takes the pill, but not that woman
B delays conception.
The Non-Identity Problem can also show up on a larger scale. Major
social policy decisions that affect the welfare of future generations also
affect the identity of the people who are going to exist. Consequently,
the future populations that are at stake when deciding whether to imple-
ment a major social policy consist of different people. Imagine that the
current population adopts a policy that causes disadvantages for the
future generation, for instance in terms of depleted resources or pollu-
tion. Assuming that those future people will have lives that are pleasant
overall and that they would not have existed had this policy not been
adopted, it seems that adopting this policy does not harm them. 3
Thus, the 'Non-Identity Problem' refers to the observation that in
different people choices the outcome that is intuitively considered better
(such as delaying conception in case of woman B or the 14-year-old
girl) does not make any particular person worse off. That is to say, it
seems impossible to condemn the action that produces less welfare or to
recommend the action that produces more welfare in person-affecting
terms. For instance, the 14-year-old girl would not benefit any partic-
ular child by delaying conception. If she delayed conception, she would
have a different child.
Note that the Impersonal View would not lead to the Non-Identity
Problem. The Impersonal View would clearly evaluate the outcome
that contains more welfare as better in terms of welfare. Since delaying
conception would result in more welfare, utilitarianism in conjunction
with the Impersonal View would require just this. The Non-Identity
Problem is a challenge for the Person-Affecting Restriction on the evalu-
ation of outcomes.
Let me recapture my argumentative strategy for this chapter and its
relation to previous chapters. A central question of this topic is whether
utilitarianism implies the Replaceability Argument. I have argued that
the Total View on whose welfare to take into account in the aggregation
of welfare implies the Replaceability Argument, while the Prior Existence
View does not. The Prior Existence View depends on the acceptance of
the Person-Affecting Restriction on the evaluation of outcomes in order
to be a coherent utilitarian view. The Non-Identity Problem counts
as the major challenge to the Person-Affecting Restriction. Therefore,
Search WWH ::




Custom Search