Appendices - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 158

view that existence cannot benefit or harm a being implies the Prior
Existence View. Arrhenius does not point out any relevant difference.
Thus, Arrhenius has not convincingly justified his claim that the Person-
Affecting Restriction would not imply the Prior Existence View, even if
causing a being to exist cannot harm or benefit that being. The implica-
tion works as I have indicated in Chapter 5.
E. A More Technical Argument for the
Wide Person-Affecting Restriction
In Chapter 7, I have defended the Wide Person-Affecting Restriction. This
view holds that outcomes should be evaluated in terms of harms and
benefits to sentient beings, However, according to the Wide as opposed
to the Narrow Person-Affecting Restriction, the focus should not be on
particular individuals but rather on sentient beings, whoever they are.
Wolf has defended the Wide Person-Affecting Restriction on the basis of
the argument that identity is vague. Wolf's assumption is that the property
or set of properties on which identity is based can vary in degree. Another
way of expressing that same point is saying that identity is not perfectly
fragile. If identity were perfectly fragile, then any minuscule change in
the relevant property or set of properties would lead to a different being.
Wolf assumes that identity is not perfectly fragile. Caspar Hare shares this
assumption and builds an argument on it that leads to the defence of the
Wide Person-Affecting Restriction. Here, I will present and discuss this
argument.
Consider Parfit's case 13 of the 14-year old girl; let's call her 'Charlotte'. Let
us assume that Charlotte can either have James now, or Jane eleven years
later. Due to the circumstances in which Charlotte finds herself, she knows
that James would have a welfare level barely above zero. Jane would have
a high level of welfare. I will follow Hare in calling James' life 'miserable'
and Jane's life 'happy'. However, it should be kept in mind that unlike the
really miserable life in Parfit's Wretched Child case, James' welfare level is
still positive. Hare argues that Charlotte should wait. Besides the assump-
tion about identity not being perfectly fragile, Hare departs from a couple
of other assumptions, which seem rather uncontroversial, at least for
utilitarians. The second assumption is that parents ought to prefer, other
things being equal, that any given child they have be better off:
Personal Dominance:
Charlotte ought to prefer a state of affairs in which she has a baby,
to an all-other-things-equal state of affairs in which she has the same
baby and he or she is worse off. 14