Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics by Tatjana Višak

Author:Tatjana Višak [Višak, Tatjana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Social Science, sociology, General, Political, social
ISBN: 9781137286277
Google: 3dfRAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2013-08-23T00:03:30.634522+00:00

7

Person-Affecting Restriction and Non-Identity Problem

1 Introduction

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.

The major challenge to the Person-Affecting Restriction is the fact that in some cases the outcome containing the most welfare and that at first glance seems to be the most beneficial does in fact not involve a benefit to any particular being. It is a challenge for the Person-Affecting Restriction how to deal with those cases. If what one does has implications for who will exist, different beings exist in different outcomes. In those cases, when no particular person exists in both outcomes, it seems impossible to say that the better outcome, i.e. the outcome that contains more welfare, is better for any particular person. Centrally, the persons that exist in one outcome do not exist in the other outcome. This challenge to the Person-Affecting Restriction has been labelled the Non-Identity Problem, because the beings that exist in both outcomes are not identical. No particular individual that exists in one outcome could possibly exist in the other outcome. In those cases, the outcome that seems to be preferable in terms of welfare does not benefit anybody.

Are those cases a reason for dismissing the Person-Affecting Restriction? No, they are not, or so I will argue. A wide interpretation of the Person-Affecting Restriction avoids the Non-Identity Problem. According to the Wide Person-Affecting Restriction, what matters in the evaluation of outcomes are indeed harms and benefits to sentient beings. However, the view does not focus on harms and benefits to particular individuals, but rather on harms and benefits to sentient beings whoever they are. The Wide Person-Affecting Restriction can be defended against possible criticism. It has advantages above the Narrow Person-Affecting Restriction. The Wide Person-Affecting Restriction is a possible view about what matters in the evaluation of outcomes.

As we will see, the Wide Person-Affecting Restriction can avoid the Non-Identity Problem. Hence, the Non-Identity Problem is no reason for dismissing the view that outcomes should

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