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 if there are more potential humans in the future.[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 (though the details of this vary, see the section below).[3][4]

Some philosophers who have discussed person-affecting views include Derek Parfit, Jan Narveson, John Broome, Jeff McMahan, Larry Temkin, Tatjana Višak, Gustaf Arrhenius, Johann Frick, Nick Beckstead, and Hilary Greaves.

  1. ^ Gustaf Arrhenius. "The Person-Affecting Restriction, Comparativism, and the Moral Status of Potential People". 2003. https://www.iffs.se/media/2287/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. ^ a b Beckstead, Nick (2013), On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future, PhD thesis, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, retrieved 5 July 2017
  4. ^ Arrhenius, Gustaf. "The Repugnant Conclusion". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 September 2020.