Person-Affecting Restriction and Non-Identity Problem

Abstract

I will now turn to the second assumption that the Prior Existence View needs in order to be a coherent utilitarian view on the question across which entities one ought to aggregate welfare. This is the assumption that what matters in the evaluation of outcomes are harms and benefits to sentient beings rather than the quantity of welfare as such. This particular view about what matters in the evaluation of outcomes is known as the Person-Affecting Restriction. It has been introduced in Chapter 2. As explained, unlike the Impersonal View, which evaluates outcomes solely on their intrinsic aspects, i.e. the quantity of welfare that they contain, the Person-Affecting Restriction evaluates outcomes in a comparative way. The Person-Affecting Restriction evaluates outcomes in terms of the harms and benefits that they entail. In order to determine the harms and benefits an outcome contains, the outcome must be compared to one or more other possible outcomes. In order to determine which outcome yields most net benefits, it matters, for instance, which people exist in each outcome and whether they would have existed in the other outcome as well.