Agriculture Reference
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outcome, according to the Person-Affecting Restriction, must be evalu-
ated in terms of harms and benefits to sentient beings.
The other assumption that a utilitarian needs in order to defend the
choice for outcome A is that causing a being to exist cannot benefit or
harm that being. Consider, again, the case of the couple contemplating
whether or not to have a child. Assume that coming into existence
does not benefit that child. Granted, the child has a certain positive
welfare level during its life. However, according to the assumption we
are currently contemplating, coming into existence does not make the
child better off, because the counterfactual situation would be nonex-
istence, and comparisons in terms of welfare between an existent child
and the child's non-existence cannot be made.
Those two assumptions together would justify not counting the possible
welfare of contingent beings in the aggregation of welfare. Consider the
above distribution of welfare for the outcome in which the couple has a
child as compared to the outcome in which the couple does not have a child.
If the outcomes have to be evaluated in terms of net benefits and if coming
into existence does not benefit the child, it follows that the welfare of the
child should not be taken into account. After all, the assumption is that an
outcome should be evaluated in terms of the net benefits, rather than in
terms of the quantity of welfare that it contains. Furthermore, the second
assumption is that coming into existence cannot harm or benefit anybody.
It follows that the welfare of contingent beings can be left out of considera-
tion. Hence, the Prior Existence View is consistent with utilitarianism, if
and only if those assumptions are accepted. Indeed, the Person-Affecting
Restriction and the assumption that causing a being to exist cannot harm
or benefit this being together imply the Prior Existence View. 13 Each of
these assumptions will indeed be defended in the following chapters: the
assumption that causing a being to exist cannot harm or benefit this being
will be defended in Chapter 6, and the Person-Affecting Restriction will be
defended in Chapter 7. They will be defended as possible views, without
the pretension to provide any knockdown arguments in favour of these
assumptions.
5 Conclusion
The Replaceability Argument only works if a possible welfare of a possible
animal that may replace a killed one is taken into account in the aggre-
gation of welfare. This possible animal is a contingent being: it does not
yet exist and whether it will exist at all depends on whether the existing
animal is killed. It is controversial whether the welfare of contingent
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