The non-identity problem concerns actions that affect who exists in the future. If such an action is performed, certain people will exist in the future who would not otherwise have existed: they are not identical to any of the people who would have existed if the action had not been performed. Some of these actions seem to be wrong, and they seem to be wrong in virtue of harming the very future individuals whose existence is dependent on their having been (...) performed. The problem arises when it is argued that the actions do not harm these people—because the actions do not make them worse off than they would otherwise be.1 Consider: Radioactive Waste Policy: We are trying to decide whether to adopt a permissive radioactive waste policy. This policy would be less inconvenient to us than our existing practices. If we enact the newly-proposed policy, then we will cause there to be radioactive pollution that will cause illness and suffering. However, the policy will have such significant effects on public policy and industry functioning, that different people will exist in the future depending on whether we enact the policy. Two things should be emphasized. First, the illness and suffering caused will be very serious: deformed babies, children with burns from acid rain, and adults dying young from cancer. Second, the policy will affect who will exist in the future because our present practices invade people’s everyday lives, for example by affecting recycling practices in the home; these practices will change if the policy is adopted. Furthermore, whether we adopt the policy will determine which plants are built where, what jobs are available, and what trucks are on the road. These effects will create small differences in everyone’s lives which ultimately affect who meets whom and who conceives with whom, or at least when people conceive. This affects who exists in the future. (shrink)

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and (...) defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. The central metaphysical claim of the book is that we are neither nonmaterial souls nor human organisms but are instead embodied minds. In ethical theory, one of the central claims is that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those that govern the killing of persons who are self‐conscious and rational. Another important theme is that killing in marginal cases should be evaluated in terms of the impact it would have on the victim at the time rather than on the value of the victim's life as a whole. What primarily matters is how killing would affect that which would be rational for the victim to care about at the time of death. By appealing to various foundational claims about identity, death, and the morality of killing, this book yields novel conclusions about such issues as abortion, prenatal injury, infanticide, the killing of animals, the significance of brain death, the termination of life support in cases of persistent vegetative state, the use of anencephalic infants as sources of organs for transplantation, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and advance directives in cases of dementia. In particular, the book defends the moral permissibility of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in certain cases and argues that brain death is not the appropriate criterion of death either for a person or a human organism. (shrink)

In "Equality, Priority, and Compassion," Roger Crisp rejects both egalitarianism and prioritarianism. Crisp contends that our concern for those who are badly off is best accounted for by appealing to "a sufficiency principle" based -- indirectly, via the notion of an impartial spectator -- on compassion for those who are badly off" (p. 745). A key example of Crisp's is the Beverly Hills case (discussed below). This example is directed against prioritarianism, but it also threatens egalitarianism. In this article, I (...) respond to the Beverly Hills case. I also challenge the wide person-affecting principle and Crisp's welfarist restriction, which some believe underlie the Levelling Down Objection against egalitarianism. My aim in this article is to defend egalitarianism by illuminating both its nature and appeal. (shrink)

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