Nonidentity problem

Last updated June 27, 2024

The nonidentity problem (also called the paradox of future individuals)^[1] in population ethics is the problem that an act may still be wrong even if it is not wrong for anyone. More precisely, the nonidentity problem is the inability to simultaneously hold the following beliefs: (1) a person-affecting view; (2) bringing someone into existence whose life is worth living, albeit flawed, is not "bad for" that person; (3) some acts of bringing someone into existence are wrong even if they are not bad for someone.^[2] Rivka Weinberg has used the nonidentity problem to study the ethics of reproduction.^[3]

The Problem

Within the literature, the problem is often conveyed through a wide variety of thought experiments each with a common character.

In each, the decision of an agent or agents will affect not only the welfare of the subjects of said action but also their identities. This determination of the identity of the subject may be direct, as in the case of common procreative decisions, or indirect, in the range of cases in which some behaviour has enough of an effect on the activities of some population to affect who copulates with whom and when, thus producing a different resultant population than would have come about under the nonperformance of the act.

Whether direct or indirect, the behaviour of the agent produces numerically distinct individuals or sets of individuals under the performance of each possible act, with each individual or set of individuals having predictable and varying levels of welfare. Our intuition tells us that the acts which are gratuitously sub-optimal in terms of the welfare produced for the subject are wrong.

However, the problem arises when we try to explain this intuitive sense of wrongness. In ordinary cases, where our action merely affects the welfare of a subject with a determinate identity, we would appeal to the harm we cause said subject. However, 'harm' is generally explained in counterfactual-comparative terms, whereby one is harmed only insofar as their welfare is made worse off under the performance of an act that it would have been under some counterfactual in which no act or an alternative act is performed.

This cannot be easily applied to the cases in question, however. Some deny that judgements of harm in respect to cases where the subject is brought into existence can even be made coherently, since harm, on this account, necessarily compares welfare between two states but an individual has no welfare before they exist and,, in fact, are not actually in any state at all; they do not even exist. If such an account of harm and benefit can be coherently applied to these 'genesis cases', then the result is even less helpful. The only way this could seemingly be done is by attaching a welfare score of '0' to non-existence, in representation of the lack of welfare and its consequent neutrality. However, in the cases in question the created subjects, by stipulation, have lives worth living. That is, their welfare score is above '0'. Hence, according to the current account, we actually benefit the subject of our act no matter which act we choose.

This, combined with the view that only 'actual' people count morally speaking ( moral actualism ) and that no action that is better for, or no worse for, every actual person can be wrong (part of, or one formulation of, the person-affecting principle) and we arrive at the conclusion that none of the acts in question can be wrong, despite our strong intuitions to the contrary.

Examples

The 14 Year Old Girl) A 14 year old girl wishes to have a child now. If she does so she will, as a result of her immaturity, give the child a bad start in life. If she waits a few years and then has a child, this child will be much happier. She does not wait.

We believe the 14 year old girl has done something wrong but we cannot justify this by appeal to her child's interests. If she had waited even another month in the interest of giving her child a better start in life, the child she conceived would have come from an entirely new egg cell and thus would not have been this child. So whatever child she produces, she has done the best she can for that child.

The Slave Girl) A young couple, who have no plans to have a child, are approached by a wealthy man. He offers them a large sum to sign a contract which dictates that the couple will conceive of a child and, when the child is born, hand it over to the man to exist in perpetual servitude to him. If they sign the contract, it will be binding. They sign the contract, conceive of the girl and hand her over to the man upon its birth.

Again, we view the couple's act as deplorable. However, we cannot explain this, as we intuitively wish to, by appealing to the harm caused to the slave girl. Remember, if harm necessarily involves a pairwise comparison, then either notions of harm do not apply to their choice at all, in which case there is no harm done and, therefore, no wrong, or we can apply the concept of harm but doing so leads us to conclude that the couple have actually benefited their child, since, by stipulation, the slave girl's welfare is still positive; that is, still above the '0' attributed to non-existence.

Risky Policy) As a society, we can choose between two energy policies: risky or safe. If we choose risky, we will enjoy a slightly higher standard of living in the near future but we risk a catastrophe for future generations. If we choose safe, our standard of living will not be quite as high but there is no risk of future catastrophe. We choose risky and 500 years in the future, catastrophe strikes and many are killed.

Here our decision less obviously affects the identities of the subjects of our act. But the increase in the standard of living will produce small changes in the lives of the population. Different people will copulate with one another than otherwise would have, and under different circumstances. These effects will cascade such that 500 years in the future it is unlikely that anyone exists who would have existed had we chose safe. Hence, although our decision kills and injures many, their lives are still worth living. And since they would not have existed had we not chosen risky, they are not harmed and hence no wrong is committed.

In bioethics

Savulescu coined the phrase procreative beneficence. It is the controversial^[4]^[5] moral obligation, rather than mere permission, of parents in a position to select their children, for instance through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and subsequent embryo selection or selective termination, to favor those expected to have the best possible life.^[6]^[7]^[8]

An argument in favor of this principle is that traits (such as empathy, memory, etc.) are "all-purpose means" in the sense of being instrumental in realizing whatever life plans the child may come to have.^[9]

In this regard, Walter Veit has gone further than Savulescu and argued that because there is no intrinsic moral difference between "creating" and "choosing" a life, eugenics becomes a natural consequence of procreative beneficence.^[4] If parents have a moral obligation to create children likely to have the best possible life, they should prefer to have children that have been genetically engineered for an optimal chance at such a life, even if those children bear little or no genetic relation to them.

Similar positions were also taken by John Harris, Robert Ranisch and Ben Saunders respectively.^[10]^[11]^[12]

Reception

Rebecca Bennett, however, criticises Savulescu's argument. Bennett argues that "the chances of any particular individual being born is spectacularly unlikely, given the infinite number of variables that had to be in place for this to happen. In order for any particular individual to exist, that individual's parents have to have been created in the first place, they have to meet at the right time and conceive us at a particular time to enable that particular sperm to fuse with that particular egg. Thus, it is clear that all sorts of things, any change in society, will effect who is born." According to Bennett, this means that no-one is actually harmed if one does not select the best offspring, as the individuals born could not have had any other, worse life as they would otherwise never have been born – "choosing worthwhile but impaired lives harms no-one and is thus not less preferable", as Bennett puts it. Bennett argues that while advocates of procreative beneficence could appeal to impersonal harm, which is where one should aim to ensure the maximum possible potential quality of life and thus embryos without or with the least impairments should be selected (as the impersonal total quality of life will be improved), this argument is flawed on two counts. Firstly on an intuitive level, Bennett questions if benefit or harm that does not affect anyone (i.e. it is impersonal) should be worthy of consideration as no actual people will gain or lose anything. Secondly and on a theoretical level, Bennett argues that attempting to increase the sum total impersonal happiness (or decrease impersonal harm) can lead to repugnant conclusions, such as being obliged to produce as many offspring as possible to bring more people into the world to raise the level of impersonal happiness, even if the quality of life of individuals suffers for it due to scarcity and overcrowding. Bennett argues that this conclusion is repugnant because "it cares little about what we normally regard as morally important: the welfare of individual people".^[13]

This argument has itself, however, been heavily scrutinized and dismissed more recently.^[14]

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References

↑ Kavka, Gregory. "The Paradox of Future Individuals" (PDF).{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
↑ Roberts, M. A. "The Nonidentity Problem". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 17 December 2015.
↑ Conly, Sarah (18 December 2018). "Review The risk of a lifetime: how, when, and why procreation may be permissible". Journal of Moral Philosophy. 15 (6): 787–790. doi:10.1163/17455243-01506007. S2CID 182385668.
1 2 Veit, Walter (2018). "Procreative Beneficence and Genetic Enhancement". KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy. 32 (11): 1–8. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.11026.89289.
↑ de Melo-Martin I (2004). "On our obligation to select the best children: a reply to Savulescu". Bioethics. 18 (1): 72–83. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2004.00379.x. PMID 15168699.
↑ Savulescu, Julian (October 2001). "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children". Bioethics. 15 (5–6): 413–26. doi:10.1111/1467-8519.00251. PMID 12058767.
↑ Savulescu, Julian; Kahane, Guy (2009). "The Moral Obligation to Have Children with the Best Chance of the Best Life" (PDF). Bioethics. 23: 274–290. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2008.00687.x. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 February 2021.
↑ Savulescu, Julian (2005). "New breeds of humans: the moral obligation to enhance". Reproductive Biomedicine Online. 10 (1): 36–39. doi:10.1016/s1472-6483(10)62202-x. PMID 15820005.
↑ Hens, K.; Dondorp, W.; Handyside, A. H.; Harper, J.; Newson, A. J.; Pennings, G.; Rehmann-Sutter, C.; De Wert, G. (2013). "Dynamics and ethics of comprehensive preimplantation genetic testing: A review of the challenges". Human Reproduction Update. 19 (4): 366–75. doi: 10.1093/humupd/dmt009 . hdl: 2123/12262 . PMID 23466750.
↑ Harris, John (2009). "Enhancements are a Moral Obligation." In J. Savulescu & N. Bostrom (Eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford University Press, pp. 131–154
↑ Ranisch, Robert (2022). "Procreative Beneficence and Genome Editing", The American Journal of Bioethics, 22(9), 20–22. doi:10.1080/15265161.2022.2105435
↑ Saunders, Ben (2015). "Why Procreative Preferences May be Moral - And Why it May not Matter if They Aren't." Bioethics, 29(7), 499–506. doi:10.1111/bioe.12147
↑ Bennett, Rebecca (2014). "When Intuition is Not Enough. Why the Principle of Procreative Beneficence Must Work Much Harder to Justify its Eugenic Vision". Bioethics. 28 (9): 447–455. doi:10.1111/bioe.12044. PMID 23841936. S2CID 25583876.
↑ Herissone-Kelly, Peter (2012). Wrongs, Preferences, and the Selection of Children: A Critique of Rebecca Bennett's Argument Against the Principle of Procreative Beneficence. Bioethics 26 (8):447-454. DOI10.1111/j.1467-8519.2010.01870.x