Person-affecting view

A person-affecting or person-based view (also called person-affecting restriction[1]) in population ethics captures the intuition that an act can only be bad if it is bad for someone.[2] Similarly something can be good only if it is good for someone. Therefore, according to standard person-affecting views, there is no moral obligation to create people nor moral good in creating people because nonexistence means "there is never a person who could have benefited from being created". Whether one accepts person-affecting views greatly influences to what extent shaping the far future is important (since there may be greatly more humans existing in the future than has ever existed).[3] Person-affecting views are also important in considering human population control.

A weaker form of person-affecting views states that an act can only be bad if it is bad for some existing or future person.

Person-affecting views can be seen as a revision of total utilitarianism in which the "scope of the aggregation" is changed from all individuals who would exist to a subset of those individuals (namely those individuals who already exist).[3]

Some philosophers who have discussed person-affecting views include Derek Parfit, John Broome, Larry Temkin, Gustaf Arrhenius, Nick Beckstead, and Hilary Greaves.

Variants

There is no single "person-affecting view" but rather a variety of formulations all involving the idea of something being good or bad for someone.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Gustaf Arrhenius. "The Person-Affecting Restriction, Comparativism, and the Moral Status of Potential People". 2003. http://www.iffs.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Person-Affecting-Restriction-Comparativism-and-the-Moral-Status-of-Potential-People.pdf
  2. Roberts, M. A., "The Nonidentity Problem", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Beckstead, Nick. On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future. 2013. PhD Thesis. Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University.
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