Abstract
When Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons, examined whether the Non-Identity Problem could be solved with the Impersonal Total Principle, he assumed perfect equality in the future population outcomes under his consideration. His thinking was that this assumption could not distort his reasoning, but would make it more simple and clear. He then reasoned that the best future population outcome, according to the Impersonal Total Principle, would be an enormous population, whose members have lives only barely worth living, as a slight lowering in quality of life, according to the principle, can always be more than compensated for by an increase in the number of future people. He found this result impossible to believe and dubbed it the Repugnant Conclusion, concluding that his attempts had ended in failures and that the Non-Identity Problem continues to undermine our beliefs of our obligations to the future. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the Impersonal Total Principle in real-world circumstances where the inevitability of inequality is taken into account. What, if anything, will this imply regarding the Repugnant Conclusion, the indirect version of the Non-Identity Problem and our abilities to ground our moral responsibilities to posterity in an ethical theory?
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Notes
Many of our profound policy choices will likely, as Parfit argued, affect how the currently living people move, travel, where they work, live, whom they meet, and with whom and when and how many children they will have – in other words the identities and number of the future people.
My belief is in line with Derek Parfit, John Broome and many other ethicists, who think that lives worse than non-existence are meaningful to contemplate about.
I want to thank my supervisor Antti Kauppinen for this and many other important insights and comments.
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Sandelin, J. Why the Non-Identity Problem Does Not Undermine our Obligations to the Future under Real-World Conditions. Philosophia 47, 851–863 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0018-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0018-2