1 Introduction

Many philosophers believe that the part of ethics that is concerned with the welfare of individuals should be cashed out in terms of how the individuals are affected – in terms of what is good and bad or better and worse for the individuals. This is known as the person-affecting view or person-affecting restriction.Footnote 1 According to the opposing impersonal view, welfare is good, period.Footnote 2 On that view, the value for the individuals has no moral significance itself; individuals do not morally matter in themselves but are of moral importance only as containers for what is of actual moral significance: welfare as such. Intuitively, however, we are fundamentally concerned with individuals and how they fare.Footnote 3 Hence, the person-affecting view seems the way to go.

Person-Affecting View:

With respect to welfare, only personal value is morally significant.

On a person-affecting view, however, it turns out to be rather difficult to account for our moral concerns towards future individuals. The person-affecting view can be specified in a narrow and a wide version which differ on their construal of the personal value that is of moral significance. For better reference, call the extent to which an outcome is better (worse) for an individual than another outcome the personal comparative value; and call the extent to which an outcome is good (or bad) for an individual the personal absolute value.

According to the narrow person-affecting view, the personal comparative value of welfare is morally significant. However, this view is confronted with Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem: The welfare of future individuals whose identity depends on our choices would not have any moral bearing on our decisions.Footnote 4 According to the wide person-affecting view, by contrast, the personal absolute value of welfare is morally significant. But that view risks running into the Repugnant Conclusion: An outcome in which the individuals live lives barely worth living would then be better than an outcome in which the individuals lead very happy lives if sufficiently many individuals exist in the former outcome.Footnote 5 Both implications seem highly implausible.

Recently, several philosophers proposed novel, allegedly person-affecting solutions to the Non-Identity Problem that avoid the Repugnant Conclusion.Footnote 6 The common feature of their proposals is to relax the narrow person-affecting view by abstracting away from the individuals’ identities in order to account for interpersonal welfare gains and losses, not just gains and losses of particular individuals. I call this position the Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare (ICV). It promises to provide a middle way between the narrow and the wide person-affecting views that captures our moral concerns towards future individuals in a person-affecting manner but avoids their flaws.

However, as I will argue, ICV is unsound. The paper is structured as follows. I introduce ICV more precisely in Sect. 2 and point out its alleged merits in Sect. 3. I will then raise three objections against ICV. First, it fails to solve the more comprehensive problem behind the Non-Identity Problem, because it still does not account for the moral significance of the welfare of some future individuals whose existence depends on our choices (Sect. 4). Second, ICV contradicts some plausible assumptions associated with the narrow person-affecting view. It leaves no room to account for the difference between harms and benefits for particular individuals and mere interpersonal differences in welfare levels of non-identical individuals (Sect. 5). Third, proponents of ICV do not align with their own presuppositions. They can assign moral significance only to either personal value or comparative value, but not to personal comparative value. Therefore, I will argue, they fail to align ICV with the Person-Affecting View altogether (Sect. 6).

2 The Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare

Recently, some philosophers offered novel approaches to account for our moral concerns of future individuals’ welfare in different people choices. The common feature of these proposals is to abstract away from the particular identities of individuals while holding on to the Person-Affecting View. Consider the following two positions.

Caspar Hare discusses Mary’s choice between conceiving a child now while she is still recovering from some disease and waiting to conceive a child until she is recovered. The choice influences the identity of the child she would conceive; and the child she would conceive now would be less healthy than the child she would conceive later. He then states:

“One morally relevant way for things to be bad is for things to be de re bad for a person. Another is for things to be bad simpliciter. Since Mary has not made things de re worse for any actual person, a natural way to explain why she has done something wrong is to say that she has made things worse simpliciter. But I say that the earlier sort of explanation remains on the table. By conceiving immediately, Mary makes things de dicto worse for the health of her future child, and this is something she should have been concerned to avoid.” (Hare 2007: 515–516.)

Hare rejects an impersonal view to capture what is morally relevant about Mary’s choice and maintains a person-affecting reasoning. Mary makes things worse for her child. However, he claims, de dicto rather than de re betterness or worseness for an individual is morally significant in cases that involve non-identical individuals: betterness for an individual whoever that individual turns out to be rather than betterness for a particular individual morally matters.

Ralf Bader proposes a person-affecting view according to which

“[t]he betterness ordering of distributions […] has to consist in betterness facts for the members of the distributions, which means that the evaluation of distributions has to be reducible to facts about personal good” (Bader 2022a: 260).

On Bader’s proposal, the evaluation of outcomes is concerned only with betterness facts for the individuals. Yet, he accounts for interpersonal welfare gains and losses by comparing lives independently from the identities of the individuals. To do so, he considers the personal betterness relation as “a dyadic relation that has lives as its relata” (Bader 2022a: 263), rather than as a triadic relation that includes, as one relata, the individual whose value it is. Since the identities of the individuals drop out of the picture, as he clarifies in his widely circulated yet unpublished manuscripts, Bader can build the evaluation of outcomes on bijective, though not necessarily identity-tracking, mappings of the individuals. Footnote 7 On such mappings

“every member of [one outcome] has a corresponding image in [the other outcome]. Distributions can then be compared by comparing the members of [the one outcome] with their images in [the other outcome] under the various bijections.” (Bader, Neutrality and conditional goodness, p. 32, unpublished manuscript.)

The moral evaluation of outcomes, thus, consists in betterness facts for the individuals based on potentially non-identity-tracking, yet bijective mappings of the individuals in the compared outcomes.

Both accounts abstract away from the particular identities. Thus, they consider neither the personal comparative nor the personal absolute value of welfare as morally significant, but rather the interpersonal comparative value of welfare: the extent to which an outcome O1 is better (or worse) for an individual than another outcome O2 is for the individual’s relevant and potentially non-identical counterpart. This definition of interpersonal comparative value leaves open how a particular account abstracts away from particular individuals’ identities – or more accurately, how an individual’s relevant counterpart is determined. The formulation, therefore, captures the different proposals – for example, Hare’s dicto betterness and Bader’s betterness of lives in bijective mappings of the individuals.Footnote 8 An individual’s counterpart can be identical if the very same individual figures as the relevant counterpart in the compared outcome; but it can also be non-identical, which is crucial to solve the Non-Identity Problem.

Given the definition of interpersonal comparative value, Hare and Bader accept the

Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare (ICV): With respect to welfare, the interpersonal comparative value is morally significant.

Note that ICV is formulated in evaluative terms, but “morally better (worse) than” may be substituted with deontic notions. I will conduct this inquiry in evaluative terms. Nevertheless, if you have reservations about evaluative comparisons of outcomes, you can substitute it with the respective equivalent in terms of moral reason to bring about O1 rather than O2. Furthermore, ICV claims a particular kind of personal value to be morally significant. This may be an unfamiliar way to define such a view. However, the formulation has the advantage that it neither presupposes any particular function in order to determine the overall moral value of an outcome nor must it accept that we can determine such an overall moral value. Hence, we can discuss ICV without relying on controversial claims about the aggregation of welfare or moral value.

Proponents of ICV also accept the already mentioned Person-Affecting View. As much is clear for Bader, given his reducibility claim which I have quoted above. In order to avoid that individuals matter merely as containers, he explicates, it must be the case that “personal good itself matters and is morally good” (Bader 2022a: 256). Hare also dismisses an impersonal explanation for the moral badness of Mary’s action to conceive a child now. Rather the explanation that Mary’s action is bad for a person “remains on the table” (Hare 2007: 215). Nevertheless, one may think that Hare accepts an impersonal view, because he also states that Mary’s responsibility not to conceive the child now is impersonal in nature.Footnote 9 However, the Person-Affecting View is not a claim about the nature of an agent’s responsibility. It is a claim about which kind of value is morally significant with respect to welfare, which in turn gives rise to the agent’s responsibility. Regarding the morally significant value, Hare is clear though.

“I suggest that it is a responsibility to avoid bringing about states of affairs that are in one particular way worse than other states of affairs—not worse simpliciter, but de dicto worse for the health of her child.” (Hare 2007: 514; emphasis added.)

Mary’s responsibility may be an impersonal one to bring about one rather than another state of affairs. However, as the quote explicates, the grounding fact is not about impersonal betterness, but about betterness for people. And since “betterness for someone” denotes personal value, Hare claims that personal, not impersonal, value is morally significant. Thus, he accepts the Person-Affecting View as well.

Furthermore, proponents of ICV accept the

Comparative View:

With respect to the comparison of outcomes, only comparative value is morally significant.

Bader claims that the moral evaluation of outcomes “consists in betterness facts for the members” (Bader 2022a: 263). In a footnote, he explicates that this is not reducible to mere goodness:

“In order for the goodness of option φ to favor φ over alternative ψ, the goodness of ψ must also be defined. There is only a stronger reason if there is more goodness, and this requires comparability of the options. Accordingly, in order to favor choosing one rather than the other, it must be the case that the one is better than the other. Being good is not enough. What is needed is betterness.” (Bader 2022a: 263, fn. 22.)

Thus, Bader is committed to the Comparative View. Hare, even though not endorsing the Comparative View explicitly, only talks about “the morally significant concept of betterness” (Hare 2007: 212; emphasis added.) He does not consider mere goodness; in particular, he does not consider the explanation that Mary’s conceiving now may merely be bad rather than worse for Mary’s child. Therefore, I consider his approach to be concerned only with how individuals are affected for the better or the worse and not how they are affected for merely being well or badly off.Footnote 10

Finally, proponents of ICV typically accept

Existence-Non-Comparativism:

Existence cannot be better or worse for an individual than her non-existence.Footnote 11

I cannot argue for this claim here but state my profound belief that it is correct, as many others have argued.Footnote 12 Bader, for example, argues that we cannot compare personal value with non-existence since the underlying betterness-relation does not apply. This is because, in a comparison with non-existence, one of the relata is missing, and non-existence does not provide any good-making features on which the personal value could supervene.Footnote 13 While Bader endorses Existence-Non-Comparativism, Hare remains vague about his view on the matter.Footnote 14 Importantly, however, if we were to reject Existence-Non-Comparativism, there would not be any good reason to accept ICV in the first place. Consider Mary’s choice as an example. If Mary’s child could be made better (or worse) off by being brought into existence, there would be an obvious moral reason for Mary to not conceive now: she would make the child she would conceive later better off to a greater extent, or benefit it more, than she would make, or benefit, her child she would conceive now. Therefore, if Existence-Non-Comparativism were false, there would not be any need to explain Mary’s moral reasons to not conceive now in terms of de dicto betterness for her child, or any other way of specifying an individual’s relevant counterpart. Even without a counterpart, an individual would gain or lose welfare relative to their non-existence. Thus, I consider any plausible version of Hare’s approach to accept Existence-Non-Comparativism as well.Footnote 15 Therefore, Existence-Non-Comparativism is, at least for the sake of the arguments for and against ICV, a plausible assumption.

3 The Alleged Merits of the Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare

ICV promises (i) to solve the Non-Identity Problem but (ii) to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion while (iii) still being committed to the Person-Affecting View and the Comparative View. I will consider those merits one at a time.

(i) ICV solves one of the biggest challenges for the ethics of future individuals: the Non-Identity Problem.Footnote 16 The problem starts from the insight that our choices can influence the identity of future individuals. Given a choice that affects the very existence of some individuals, call the individuals whose existence it affects non-identical (with respect to that choice). Since existence cannot be better or worse for individuals than their non-existence, our choices are neither better nor worse for non-identical individuals. On the narrow person-affecting view, therefore, the welfare of non-identical individuals does not have any moral bearing on our decisions.Footnote 17 Intuitively, however, our actions are morally constrained by how future individuals fare. We would better save some natural resources for the sake of future individuals; we should refrain from leaving behind, for example, nuclear waste that is potentially catastrophic for future individuals; and we ought to stop, or at least mitigate, climate change and, thus, prevent future individuals from suffering the consequences of global warming. Importantly, we believe that this is so even if our choices determine who those individuals are and even if they had all lives worth living.

ICV provides a straightforward solution to the Non-Identity Problem. Even though non-identical individuals would be neither better nor worse off, they could be better or worse off than other individuals – their relevant counterparts – who would exist in the alternative outcome. Hence, if our actions influence both the level of welfare and the identity of an individual, the outcome resulting from the action that brings about a happier individual can be better for the individual than the alternative is for a less happy individual. Thus, according to ICV, if the two individuals qualify as relevant counterparts, the extent to which the first outcome is better for the happier individual than the alternative outcome is for the less happy individual is morally significant.

(ii) ICV avoids implausible implications of other solutions to the Non-Identity Problem, in particular the

Repugnant Conclusion:

Compared with a population of very many individuals with very high levels of welfare (population A), there is some much larger population (population Z) which is morally better although all the individuals in the larger population have lives that are barely worth living.Footnote 18

The impersonal view and the wide person-affecting view imply the Repugnant Conclusion if supplemented with a total sum function of welfare. The total sum of welfare in population Z is higher than in population A if sufficiently many individuals with positive welfare exist in population Z.Footnote 19 In addition, there are further powerful arguments well known from Parfit’s and others’ writings which show that, even without a total sum function, the Repugnant Conclusion might seem inevitable on the impersonal view and the wide person-affecting view.Footnote 20

ICV, by contrast, has the potential to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion even with a total sum function or even given the assumptions of the mentioned arguments. The reason is that ICV does not assign moral significance to absolute welfare but only to interpersonal comparative welfare – the interpersonal welfare gains and losses. To see that, we need to distinguish two cases. On the one hand, if some of the individuals in population Z have a relevant counterpart in population A, these individuals are worse off in Z than their relevant counterparts in A. Thus, the individuals in Z have only negative interpersonal comparative value relative to their counterparts in A and, therefore, Z – the larger population – is worse than A – the smaller population. In that case, ICV implies the opposite of the Repugnant Conclusion. On the other hand, if no individual in Z has a relevant counterpart in A, there is no interpersonal comparative value at all. Then, it is not the case that Z is better than A, and, thus, ICV does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion.Footnote 21 Therefore, ICV avoids the Repugnant Conclusion at least in the sense that it does not imply it.

(iii) ICV’s third merit is its persisting – but, as we will see later, alleged – commitment to the Person-Affecting View and the Comparative View. Many people believe, at least initially, that if an outcome O1 is morally better (worse) than another outcome O2, it is better (worse) for someone. This is the basic intuition underlying the narrow person-affecting view.Footnote 22 It reflects the idea that outcomes should be assessed based on how they affect the individuals’ lives for the better or the worse. In other words, the comparative personal value is relevant for the moral evaluation and comparison of outcomes. Both the impersonal view and the wide person-affecting view deviate from that idea which, as Bader analyses, is the “reason that impersonal [and wide person-affecting, I add] versions of utilitarianism lead to Repugnant Conclusions in variable-population cases” (Bader 2022a: 257). The narrow person-affecting view, on the other hand, is confronted with the Non-identity Problem, as mentioned in the beginning of this section.

ICV manages the balance between the two sides by considering only personal comparative value as morally significant but allowing that value to be conceived interpersonally – from comparisons of the welfare of individuals with the welfare of those individuals’ relevant and potentially non-identical counterparts. In this manner, ICV seems to preserve the commitment of the narrow person-affecting view to the moral significance of personal comparative value.

In what follows, however, I will argue that ICV should be rejected. It fails to avoid the broader problem behind the Non-Identity Problem (Sect. 4), contradicts plausible assumptions associated with the narrow person-affecting view (Sect. 5), and violates the Person-Affecting View (Sect. 6).

4 The Problem of Contingent Individuals

ICV solves the Non-Identity Problem. Nevertheless, it fails to comprehensively account for the moral value of future individuals’ welfare. This becomes clear when we realise that there is a broader problem underlying the Non-Identity Problem.

A moral theory of welfare should be able to account for our moral concerns towards future individuals, I assume. It should do so at least in the sense that the welfare of all future individuals can make a difference on the moral assessment of the outcomes in which the individuals exist. For example, such a theory should be able to assess whether an outcome with unlimited climate change or an outcome with only moderate climate change is morally better with respect to the welfare of the individuals that exist in those outcomes. One way to spell that out is

Concern for Future Individuals:

The welfare of all future individuals can be morally significant.

ICV, however, does not satisfy Concern for Future Individuals. Our choices can influence not only the identity of future individuals but also their number. This is so in procreative choices, but also in large-scale decisions. If the identity of individuals or their number differs in the compared outcomes, some of the individuals exist in only one of the compared outcomes. Their existence is not settled yet. We can call the individuals whose existence depends on the compared outcomes contingent individuals.Footnote 23 Concern for Future Individuals and the fact that some individuals are contingent lead to the

Problem of Contingent Individuals Footnote 24

  1. (1)

    The welfare of all future individuals can be morally significant.

  2. (2)

    Some future individuals are contingent.

  3. (3)

    With respect to welfare, only interpersonal comparative value is morally significant.

  4. (4)

    The welfare of some contingent individuals cannot have interpersonal comparative value.

  5. (C1)

    It is not the case that the welfare of all future individuals can be morally significant (from (2) to (4)).

  6. (C2)

    It is not the case that the welfare of all future individuals can be morally significant, but the welfare of all future individuals can be morally significant (from (1) and (C1)).

(1) is Concern for Future Individuals. (2) stems from the empirical fact that our choices can influence which particular individuals will come into existence. If so, some future individuals exist in only one of the compared outcomes – the contingent individuals. (3) is ICV considered as a specification of the Person-Affecting View. And (4) is true because, if the numbers of individuals in the compared outcomes differ, some contingent individuals cannot be better or worse off than some other individual in the compared outcome on any bijective mapping of the individuals. Necessarily, some individual in the higher populated outcome will not have any counterpart in the lesser populated outcome on any bijective mapping and, thus, cannot be better or worse off than their counterpart.Footnote 25 Together, (2) to (4) imply that it is not the case that the welfare of all future individuals can be morally significant, but (1) claims that the welfare of all future individuals can be.Footnote 26 I call this contradiction the Problem of Contingent Individuals.

Proponents of ICV might object that we would not need to be concerned with the welfare of all future individuals. In particular, the welfare of merely additional individuals should not morally matter. Therefore, it would suffice to solve the Non-Identity Problem rather than the Problem of Contingent Individuals. However, this claim is troubling for two reasons. On the one hand, it does not make any difference for a particular individual that comes into existence whether their non-identical counterpart existed in the alternative outcome or not. Accordingly, we might wonder why the individual’s welfare would be morally significant if there is a relevant counterpart in the alternative but why it would not be morally significant if there is no such counterpart in the alternative. That difference does not affect the individual in any way; in both cases the individual exists in one outcome with the same level of welfare (we can stipulate), and it does not exist in the alternative. If we make a difference in the two cases, we seem to deviate from the Person-Affecting View. ICV’s proponents can avoid this implication, though, by claiming that there is a difference in interpersonal comparative value and, thus, can be explained in person-affecting terms. For now, I must grant this. In Sect. 6, however, I will argue that interpersonal comparative value does not always qualify as personal value.

On the other hand, literally everyone would want to count the welfare of at least some of the individuals who do not have any counterpart in the alternative. That is best shown by what Nils Holtug calls the Problem of Suffering Fig. 1.Footnote 27

Fig. 1
figure 1

The Problem of Suffering

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Ivy exists in outcome A with a miserable life, but she does not exist in outcome B, everything else being equal. Intuitively, A is morally worse than B. We should, therefore, accept the

Negative Addition Intuition: The addition of an individual with a miserable life makes an outcome morally worse, everything else being equal.

As the narrow person-affecting view, ICV fails to account for that intuition. If the number of individuals in two compared outcomes differs, there is at least one individual who does not have any counterpart on any one-on-one mapping of the individuals in the compared outcomes.Footnote 28 Consequently, at least one individual does not have any interpersonal comparative value. The outcome is neither better nor worse for that individual than the alternative is for her counterpart, because no such counterpart exists. On ICV, the individual’s welfare cannot make an outcome morally better or worse and, thus, ICV does not account for the Negative Addition Intuition.Footnote 29

Both the Problem of Suffering and the Non-Identity Problem are mere instances of the more comprehensive Problem of Contingent Individuals. They are not concerned with all contingent individuals. The Non-Identity Problem focuses only on those contingent individuals who have counterparts in the compared outcome onto which they can be mapped. The Problem of Suffering addresses only those contingent individuals who do not have counterparts in the compared outcome and lead miserable lives. The underlying reason for both to be problems in the first place, however, is that the welfare of some contingent individuals cannot have any kind of interpersonal comparative value. To tackle the problems at their core, we are well advised to focus on the broader problem – the Problem of Contingent Individuals – rather than to find solutions only to certain aspects of that problem. However, ICV does not do so and, therefore, fails to account for our moral concerns towards the welfare of all future individuals.

5 The Moral Significance of Individual Harms and Benefits

ICV considers interpersonal comparative value as morally significant – the extent to which one outcome is better or worse for an individual than the alternative is for her relevant and potentially non-identical counterpart. Since that does not exclude identity-mappings of the individuals, ICV might seem able to accommodate the merits of the narrow person-affecting view. However, on closer inspection, it contradicts plausible assumptions which make the narrow person-affecting view so attractive.

ICV cannot distinguish between welfare gains and losses for particular individuals and interpersonal welfare gains and losses. To see that, consider the difference between the following two cases Figs. 2 and 3.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Identical Welfare Profile with Pareto-Inferiority

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Fig. 3
figure 3

Identical Welfare Profile without Pareto-Inferiority

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Si denotes different individuals; the height of the bars illustrates their levels of welfare; a missing bar indicates that the respective individual does not exist. The welfare profile of the two cases is identical. In all four outcomes, there is one individual with a high level of welfare and another individual with a moderate level of welfare. The difference is that, while S1 exists in both I and J, S1 exists only in K but not in L. Instead, another individual, S4, exists in L.

Many people believe that individual harms and benefits morally matter in themselves. If we assume that harms and benefits should be spelled out in a counterfactual comparative way, that belief resembles and arguably motivates the narrow person-affecting view: outcomes are morally better or worse insofar as they benefit or harm individuals – insofar as they are better or worse for individuals than the alternative would have been for those individuals.Footnote 30 If the belief is true, there must be a difference in the comparisons between the outcomes I and J, and the outcomes K and L. For, while S1 is harmed in J relative to I, no one is harmed in L relative to K. Only if there is a difference in the evaluation between J and I, and K and L, it can be true that benefits and harms to particular individuals matter in themselves.Footnote 31

You might reject either a counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefits or the belief that harms and benefits matter in themselves. However, the argument also works with the extremely plausible assumption that a pareto-inferior outcome is in at least one respect morally worse, where, as I use the term here, an outcome is pareto-inferior to another outcome if and only if it is worse for some individual but better for no individual.Footnote 32 While J is pareto-inferior to I, L is not pareto-inferior to K. Thus, if the assumption is true, there must be a difference between the comparison of I and J, and the comparison of K and L.

ICV, however, is not able to account for the difference between the two cases, because the comparative value it claims to be morally significant is derived from one-on-one mappings of individuals with their relevant counterparts.Footnote 33 While my formulation of ICV leaves open the particular way of determining those mappings, we can still go through the possible mappings. Suppose S1 is mapped to itself in I and J, and S2 in I is mapped onto S3 in J. Then, S1’s welfare is reduced from I to J to the same extent as the welfare of S3 in J exceeds the welfare of S2 in I. Thus, ICV implies that I and J are morally equal.Footnote 34 If S1 in I is mapped onto S3 in J and S2 in I is mapped onto S1 in J, there are no interpersonal gains or losses in I relative to J and vice versa. Thus, again, I and J turn out to be morally equal on ICV. The same holds for the comparison of K and L. Either S1 in K is mapped onto S3 in L, and S2 in K is mapped onto S4 in L, in which case there are neither interpersonal welfare gains nor losses, and K and L turn out to be morally equal. Or S1 in K is mapped onto S4 in L, and S2 in K is mapped onto S3 in L, in which case the interpersonal gains and losses cancel each other out, and, thus, K and L are morally equal.Footnote 35 Therefore, ICV does not account for the difference in the comparisons of the outcomes in the two cases and, thus, contradicts the plausible assumptions closely associated with the narrow person-affecting view: benefits and harms to particular individuals matter in themselves, and pareto-inferior outcomes are at least in one way morally worse.

Proponents of ICV might object that we should understand the relevant intuitions in interpersonal terms. The pertinent way to argue for that is to advance a principle of impartiality, universalizability, or permutation-invariance; the idea that – to borrow Christoph Fehige’s terms – “it must not matter who plays which part” (Fehige 1998: 527) or that – in Bader’s terms – “permuting the identities of the members of the distribution, whilst holding fixed the structure or value profile of the distribution, does not affect the betterness ordering” (Bader 2022a: 262). If plausible, it might not be the harm or benefit to particular individuals that is in itself morally significant, but rather the interpersonal welfare gains and losses. Analogously, not (personal) pareto-inferiority would make an outcome in one respect morally worse than another, but interpersonal pareto-inferiority. This can be seen by the fact that permutation-invariance allows to permute the individuals in J such that permuted J is identical with L, namely, if S1 is permuted with S4.

However, for the argument to succeed, we need a particularly strong version of permutation-invariance. Bader proposes

Strong Permutation-Invariance: For any two outcomes O1 and O2, O1 is morally better (worse) than O2 if and only if the restriction to O1 of any permutation of the universal domain is morally better (worse) than the restriction of O2 of any permutation of the universal domain.Footnote 36

A weak version of permutation-invariance would allow only for permutations of the individuals that actually exist in an outcome. Strong Permutation-Invariance, by contrast, allows to permute the actual individuals in an outcome with merely possible individuals, that is, individuals who exist only in the alternative outcome. Just by advancing Strong Permutation-Invariance we can permute the individuals such that J turns out identical with L. Hence, in order to argue for the claim that interpersonal gains and losses rather than individual benefits and harms matter in themselves, Strong Permutation-Invariance is needed.

What should we make of the argument? Many people believe that moral assessments should be impartial in the sense that it does not matter which particular individual is affected. For example, if you can benefit (in the counterfactual comparative sense) a particular individual – call her Sarah – to a certain extent, it does not matter that this is Sarah. If you benefited another individual – Stefan – to the same extent, there would not be any difference from a moral point of view. It does not matter who plays which part. Nevertheless, this does not amount to Strong Permutation-Invariance. A weaker version would account for the idea that moral assessments should be impartial insofar as it does not matter which particular individual is benefited or harmed. Strong Permutation-Invariance, by contrast, does not only abstract away from the particular identities of the individuals but even from whether an individual exists in the alternative and, thus, from whether the outcome can be better or worse for the particular individual – whether the individual can be harmed or benefited at all. Therefore, a mere reference to impartiality does not suffice to establish Strong Permutation-Invariance.

On the contrary, we have the strong intuition that benefits and harms morally matter in themselves. And without any further arguments in favour of Strong Permutation-Invariance, there is no good reason to accept it. But since weaker versions of permutation-invariance would not suffice to rule out the intuition that individual benefits and harms matter in themselves, I do not see any reason why we should reject that intuition in favour of the interpersonal equivalent. Thus, my point remains: ICV contradicts plausible assumptions that make the narrow person-affecting view so attractive.

6 Pseudo Person-Affectingness

Proponents of ICV claim that the morally significant value of welfare is personal – they accept the Person-Affecting View. Plausibly, a value is personal if and only if it is the value for an individual S, which is indicated by our value-relations to include “for an individual S” as in “x is good (or bad) for Sarah” and “x is better (or worse) for Stefan”. Furthermore, proponents of ICV consider the morally significant personal value as comparative, it seems at least, insofar as it is the extent to which one outcome is better than the compared outcome. If that were correct, the morally significant personal value of welfare would have to be both personal and comparative – that is, it must be the extent to which one outcome is better for an individual S than the compared outcome.Footnote 37

However, as I will argue in this section, ICV does not provide personal value if the value is derived from interpersonal comparisons. And since interpersonal comparisons are necessary in order to account for the moral significance of the welfare of individuals in different people comparisons – that is, in order to solve the Non-Identity Problem – ICV violates the Person-Affecting View.

Consider a standard non-identity case: In one outcome, one individual – call her Happy – is well off; in the alternative outcome, another individual – call her Very Happy – is very well off; and the two individuals do not exist in the other outcome, respectively. Mary’s choice in Hare’s discussion is an instance of that example. The two outcomes are neither better nor worse for both Happy and Very Happy given Existence-Non-Comparativism. Hence, in the non-identity case, ICV cannot claim that interpersonal comparative value is personal.

Interpersonal comparative value can be personal only in the sense of the extent to which the first outcome is worse for Happy than the second outcome is for Very Happy. But that is not the value for any particular individual. Rather it is a comparative value of one individual’s welfare relative to another individual’s welfare – the value of Happy’s welfare relative to Very Happy’s welfare but neither of Happy’s welfare nor of Very Happy’s welfare themselves. Therefore, the value ICV claims to be morally significant is no personal value at all; it is not the value for any particular individual. Thus, ICV violates the Person-Affecting View.

How can ICV be compatible with the Person-Affecting View, then? Hare might argue that we should understand interpersonal comparative value as the extent to which an outcome is better for one individual than the alternative outcome in the de dicto rather than in the de re sense. While de re betterness for individuals picks out the betterness for a particular individual, de dicto betterness is concerned with the value relation between two outcomes for an individual under a general description that can be instantiated by different particular individuals who fit the description. The interpersonal comparative value would, therefore, be a personal value in the de dicto sense. We should accept that, Hare would argue, because we are sometimes morally concerned with de dicto betterness for individuals (rather than with de re betterness only). In particular, he claims that a safety officer who is in charge of regulating rules for safe driving must be concerned with how de dicto better the rules are for car accident victims, because the introduction of the rules changes which particular individuals have car accidents. And since this case shares the non-identity feature of non-identity cases (the decision changes the identity of the affected individuals), de dicto betterness would be morally significant in non-identity cases, too.Footnote 38

However, Hare’s argument does not help ICV to get aligned with the Person-Affecting View. It does not yield personal value understood as value for a particular individual but only value of, as we might put it, a general individual. A general individual, however, is a set of possible individuals only one of whom is going to actually exist. It is not a particular individual.Footnote 39 The idea that the value of a general individual is personal, however, blurs the meaning of personal value. It is a rather obscure way to just say that interpersonal comparative value is the extent to which an outcome is better for one individual than the alternative outcome is for another individual, because the de dicto better for relation does not refer to one particular individual but to at least two. Or in other words: There is no betterness for any particular individual but only betterness for one rather than for another individual. Therefore, the de dicto construal of interpersonal comparative value is confronted with the very same objection and, thus, fails to align ICV with the Person-Affecting View.

One might claim that this is no problem for Hare’s account. Even though interpersonal comparative value indeed refers to two particular individuals, the safety officer case would show that we are sometimes concerned with precisely that: the “personal” value of a general individual, or the “personal” value of one individual relative to another individual. Therefore, we should accept interpersonal comparative value to be morally significant in non-identity cases as well even if it does not align with the Person-Affecting View.

However, as David Boonin shows, the safety officer case is unconvincing. On the one hand, it is disanalogous to the non-identity cases. Car accident victims are harmed (in a counterfactual comparative sense) but non-identical individuals are not. Thus, even if the safety officer case would show that we are sometimes concerned with de dicto betterness, we cannot conclude that we should also be concerned with it in non-identity cases. On the other hand, we can explain the safety officer case by the fact that the overall harm (in a comparative counterfactual sense) done to car accident victims is morally significant: introducing a safety rule is morally better if the overall harm done to car accident victims is minimized. This explanation refers only to what is better or worse for particular individuals. Thus, there is no need for de dicto betterness to explain the safety officer case. Consequently, we have no reason to accept that de dicto betterness is morally significant in the first place.Footnote 40

Bader’s account also seems to be subject to the objection that is does not align with the Person-Affecting View. He understands the betterness relation between two lives Lx and Ly as personal betterness relation. Consequently, the morally significant interpersonal comparative value seems to be the extent to which Lx is better than Ly. But since the lives are detached from the particular individuals’ identities, x and y can be different individuals. Thus, in the non-identity case, the interpersonal comparative value would not be the value of any particular individual but of two individuals just in the same way as Hare’s de dicto construal of interpersonal comparative value.

Bader’s proposal might suggest a different construal of interpersonal comparative value. He claims that “the betterness ordering […] has to consists in betterness facts for the members” but then specifies that “the evaluation of distributions has to be reducible to facts about personal good” (Bader 2022a: 260) – to personal goodness not personal betterness, that is. We might, therefore, understand the personal betterness relation in Bader’s proposal as Lx is good for x to a greater extent than Ly is good for y. We could then construe interpersonal comparative value as the extent to which one outcome is more good (bad) for one individual than the alternative outcome is good (bad) for another individual. This construal is indeed based on personal value: One outcome is good (or bad) for an individual, and it is so to a larger extent than the alternative outcome is good (or bad) for another individual. The “good (or bad) for” relations are relative only to one individual, respectively.Footnote 41 Hence, ICV construed in this way might seem to avoid the objection that it fails to provide personal value in non-identity cases.

However, it remains unclear in which sense the so understood betterness relation or the so understood interpersonal comparative value is still personal. For as soon as we invoke the comparative element according to which Lx is good for x to a greater extent than Ly is for y, we seem to fall back into the construal of interpersonal comparative value discussed above. The so understood interpersonal comparative value is not the value for any particular individual but only some value derived from the value for one individual relative to the value for some other individual. Therefore, even that alternative version of Bader’s construal of interpersonal comparative value violates the Person-Affecting View.

Proponents of ICV might alternatively claim that they indeed accept absolute personal value as the morally significant personal value but restrict its moral significance to those cases in which the individual in question has a relevant counterpart in the compared outcomes. The idea would be that absolute personal value yields moral value only in those cases in which both values are defined, which is the case only if one individual exists in one outcome and that individual’s counterpart exists in the alternative outcome. While the resulting value is not comparative in a strict sense, it still invokes a comparative element insofar as the value depends on the existence of absolute personal value for the individual’s counterpart in the compared outcome. In that way the construal would still redeem the claim that ICV avoids the Repugnant Conclusion.

The restriction, however, implies that, in different people choices, the morally significant personal value of a particular individual’s welfare depends on facts about the existence of other individuals. Suppose that in one case, Happy exists in one outcome and Very Happy exists in the alternative outcome, but in another case Very Happy does not exist in the alternative outcome, everything else being equal. Happy’s welfare would have moral value in the first case, but it would not in the second case. The difference is not reducible to any difference in Happy’s welfare, neither in the first nor in the second outcome. In both cases, Happy exists in the first outcome and is well off and Happy does not exist in the second outcome. Therefore, the restriction implies that the moral value of Happy’s welfare depends on something else than Happy’s welfare. This, again, fits badly with the Person-Affecting View: The moral value of an individual’s welfare would not only depend on the personal value for that individual, but also on the personal value for another individual. Therefore, we should reject the construal of ICV as a restricted version of the wide person-affecting view, too.

ICV is supposed to be person-affecting and comparative: the morally significant value must be value for someone, and it must be the extent to which one outcome is better than another outcome. However, ICV cannot fulfil this desideratum in non-identity cases. If ICV is meant to be understood as basing moral assessments on comparative value, that value cannot be personal in non-identity cases, because it would not be the value for any particular individual but merely of a general individual. This violates the Person-Affecting View. If, by contrast, the value was meant to be understood as personal, that value could not be comparative in non-identity cases but only absolute. This violates the Comparative View. Hence, either way, the value that is claimed to be morally significant – interpersonal comparative value – cannot be comparative and personal. In addition, by taking the latter route, proponents of ICV have to invoke a restriction on personal absolute value in order to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Yet, the restriction implies that some moral differences are due to other things than differences of the personal value of particular individuals. This, again, violates the Person-Affecting View. ICV is, therefore, no person-affecting view at all but merely pseudo person-affecting: it comes in the guise of the Person-Affecting View but, as I have argued, turns out to violate that view in non-identity cases.

7 Conclusion

In this paper, I have dealt with the merits and flaws of the Interpersonal Comparative View – the view that the extent to which an outcome O1 is better (or worse) for an individual than another outcome O2 is for the individual’s relevant and potentially non-identical counterpart is morally significant. ICV solves the Non-Identity Problem by allowing personal comparative value to be conceived interpersonally. But, I argued, it does so only on pain of contradicting the intuitions that individual harms and benefits are morally significant in themselves and that pareto-inferior outcomes are at least in one way morally worse. ICV avoids the Repugnant Conclusion by invoking a comparative element that considers an individual’s welfare as morally relevant only if the individual can be mapped onto a counterpart in the alternative outcome. But that restriction renders ICV unable to solve the Problem of Contingent Individuals and, thus, fails to account for the moral value of the welfare of those future individuals that do not have counterparts in the alternative outcome. And ICV is claimed to align with the view that welfare has moral value insofar as it has personal value for the individual whose welfare it is, and that personal value is comparative in nature. However, in non-identity cases, ICV can assign moral significance only either to personal absolute value or to non-personal comparative value, but not to personal comparative value. Therefore, ICV does not stand with its alleged commitments.

The three objections should make us question how much of an advantage ICV actually is. It is supposed to provide a middle way between the narrow and the wide person-affecting views by considering personal comparative value as morally significant but allowing that value to be derived from interpersonal comparisons. However, by striking this middle, it cuts too many things along the way. ICV abandons the intuitions that underlie the narrow person-affecting view, obstructs the advantage of the wide person-affecting view to account for the welfare of all future individuals, and turns out to be pseudo person-affecting. Therefore, I conclude, we should reject ICV.