Abstract
Can an act harm someone—a future someone, someone who does not exist yet but will—if that person would never exist but for that very action? This is one question raised by the non-identity problem. Many would argue that the answer is No: an action harms someone only insofar as it is worse for her, and an action cannot be worse for someone if she would not exist without it. The first part of this paper contends that the plausibility of the ‘no harm’ argument stems from an equivocation. The second half argues for an account of harm that is both causal and contrastive. Finally, the paper contends that the contrastive account disarms the no harm argument and furthermore neutralizes a related argument (the benefit argument) that has been problematic for some previously proposed solutions to the non-identity problem.
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Notes
The choice in the Risky Policy would almost certainly be a Different Number Choice, since it affects the standard of living which in turn affects the birth rate. Parfit however treats it as a Same Number Choice, and I shall follow suit.
Hanser (1990, 52 n. 11) reads Parfit the same way. Indeed, most discussions of Parfit’s arguments replace his “worse for” locution with “make worse off”.
Several qualifications and clarifications are here in order. First, (2a) has a corollary about benefiting people: viz, that an action benefits someone only if it makes her better off than she otherwise would have been. In order to keep things manageable, I shall for the most part ignore benefiting and simply assume that it receives parallel treatment. Second, when I say that an act makes someone worse off, I shall take that to mean that her lifetime wellbeing is lower than it otherwise would have been, not necessarily that her wellbeing at that time is lower than it would have been, since otherwise it’s hard to see how killing someone could make her worse off. Third, I should point out that Parfit does not endorse the counterfactual requirement in precisely this form. His official view of harming and benefiting is given rather by
(C6) An act benefits someone if its consequence is that someone is benefited more. An act harms someone if its consequence is that someone is harmed more. The act that benefits people most is the act whose consequence is that people are benefited most (1984, 69).
Presumably, Parfit puts it this way in order to leave room for the view (defended but not endorsed in Appendix G) that causing someone to exist can benefit that person even though it is not better for her. Causing someone to exist is, Parfit says, a special case and may reasonably be treated as an exception to the counterfactual requirement (1984, 489–90).
Whether these are really two senses (in the semanticist’s sense of “sense”—i.e., two meanings) of the “worse for” locution is to me unclear. Perhaps the expression is polysemous, or maybe we just have two different comparative notions which are easily conflated. For my purposes, the difference between these two claims matters not.
Woollard (2012) makes much the same point. However she goes on to claim that a preempting cause such as B only harms Traveler in a non-comparative sense that is more easily overridden than harming in (what she calls) the overall comparison sense. According to the view I develop below, on the other hand, B does harm Traveler in a comparative sense, no different from the sense in which one harms a person in cases without preempted backups. The reason we can justify killing Traveler in a case like Hostage isn’t that he’s harmed in a lesser, non-comparative sense; it is rather that he was going to be harmed just as badly anyway, a condition that doesn’t obtain in non-identity cases.
Compare Norcross (2005, 156).
Or, I would add, if it prevents something with which the person would have been better off. Preventative harms/benefits raise questions beyond the scope of this paper, some of which are discussed by Hanser (2008).
I discuss it elsewhere in “On harming and benefiting future persons” (under review).
Dog-bite is generally attributed to McDermott (1995).
Much depends on the salient contrast. Suppose the dog is trained to attack and kill Terrorists on sight. Usually he succeeds, but in this case Terrorist manages just barely to block the attack with his right hand, which gets mangled by the dog. Now the salient contrast to the dog’s biting Terrorist’s right hand might be the dog’s killing Terrorist, and of course the dog’s biting Terrorist’s right hand rather than killing Terrorist is a cause of Terrorist’s pushing the button with his left hand rather that not at all.
The account proposed here (CC) is closely related to two other accounts or partial accounts of harming that recently appeared in the literature. Hanser (2009) proposes a sufficient though not necessary condition for harming that appeals to contrastive explanation (rather than causation). Independently, Thomson (2011) proposes what she calls the “Revised Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harming”, which requires that the act cause the person harmed to be in one state while also preventing her from being in another, worse state. I was unaware of both papers when writing this paper’s early drafts. Since becoming aware of them papers, I have benefited greatly from each.
I suspect that my (CC) is equivalent to Thomson’s Revised Counterfactual Comparative Account, given certain assumptions about prevention. One significant difference between my approach and either Hanser’s or Thomson’s is my argument (below) that the contrastive theory defeats the benefit argument as well as the no harm argument. Thomson (2011) does not discuss the benefit argument, while Hanser (2009) seems inclined to accept its conclusion while trying to minimize its significance. I think that a better response is available.
Here I agree with Hanser (2009, 181):
In order for there to be a respect in which someone is better off in one scenario than in another, he must have some level or other of well-being in each scenario. And in order for a person to have a level of well-being in a scenario, he must exist in that scenario. (A person who does not exist does not have a “neutral” level of well-being.)
Parfit too appears to agree:
Causing someone to exist is a special case because the alternative would not have been worse for that person. We may admit that, for this reason, causing someone to exist cannot be better for this person. But it may be good for this person. (1984, Appendix G, 489)
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Acknowledgments
Distant ancestors of this paper were presented at the University of Wisconsin’s “Soberfest—a conference in honor of Elliott Sober”, at the 2014 Pacific APA, and at the University of Connecticut. I am grateful to those audiences and especially to Andre Ariew, Ted Bach, Molly Gardner, Dan Hausman, Melinda Roberts, Nate Sheff, Elliott Sober, Chris Stephens, BJ Strawser, Rob Streiffer, and Naftali Weinberger.
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Bontly, T.D. Causes, contrasts, and the non-identity problem. Philos Stud 173, 1233–1251 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0543-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0543-9