Have We Solved the Non-Identity Problem?

Woollard, Fiona

doi:10.1007/s10677-012-9359-2

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…As Woollard concludes, 'perhaps any proposed solution to the Non-Identity Problem will have to deal with an inevitable lingering dissatisfaction'. 59 As McMahan admits, 'Problems in the morality of causing people to exist seem to me the most difficult and intractable of all the problems of which I am aware in normative and practical ethics'. 60 As Rulli also ends up pointing out, we must be cautious when trying to draw firm and indisputable conclusions from the non-identity problem.…”

Section: Con Clus Ionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

He Jiankui´s gene‐editing experiment and the non‐identity problem

Fernández

Savulescu

2021

Bioethics

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Although genetic engineering cannot be considered a new technology, CRISPR has taken it to a whole new level. The quickness and precision of this new biotechnology, as well as its wide range of applications, make CRISPR nothing less than a revolution. 1 The history is by now well known: the work of F. Mojica on the immune system of archaea and bacteria in the 1990s served as the basis of the development by J. Doudna and E. Charpentier in 2012, and shortly after by F. Zhang, of a gene-editing technology that emulated the bacterial immune system's ability to cut DNA with high precision. Since then, this technology has been successfully applied to all kinds of organisms, including mammals, and has been perfected and amplified not only to cut, but also to add genes. More recently, 'prime editing', developed in 2019 by David Liu and his colleagues at the Broad Institute (Cambridge, Massachusetts), seems to have reduced significantly the shortcomings of CRISPR, namely its precision, by making it 'possible to insert or delete specific sequences at genome targets with less collateral damage'. 2 Doudna and Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for their work on CRISPR. Gene editing of humans has been controversial since the introduction of this technology. However, many have been surprised by how fast its implementation has been. In 2015, J. Huang and his Chinese team reported that they had edited human zygotes. Two years after, in 2017, K. Niakan's group in the U.K. was able to genetically modify human blastocysts. But it was in the last months of 2018 that Chinese researcher He Jiankui shocked the world when he claimed to have helped in the birth of the first genetically modified human babies, Lulu and Nana, with a third pregnancy underway. He Jiankui's experiment recruited HIV-serodiscordant couples: couples in which the man is HIV-infected, while the woman is not.The couples were informed that this procedure might make their children immune to HIV, and had their fertility treatment and pregnancy medical care paid for by the researchers. During IVF, the

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Section: Con Clus Ionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

He Jiankui´s gene‐editing experiment and the non‐identity problem

Fernández

Savulescu

2021

Bioethics

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“…Mill never reached a resolution of this problem and debate on it continues in fields concerned with social justice, the environment (Dobson, 1999;Woollard, 2012) and applications of technology to fertility (Weinberg, 2013;Gardner, 2015). It applies in societies where laws can only apply to people who can be clearly identified and this usually means the living.…”

Section: The 'Non-identity Problem'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Situating human generations in Big History

Nixon¹

2018

JBH

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Big History provides the cosmology for the present work in which the disproportionate impact of inequality on today's young generation is contextualised by examination of three types of societies, past empires, present capitalism and one pre-colonisation indigenous society, over time periods of more than centuries. Generations are seen as demographically referenced social locations like gender and race and at any one time several interdependent generations exist. Other referents include the work of JS Mill, his controversial ethology project, the history of ideas, the non-identity problem and social anthropology. The article concludes by anticipating a tentative reconstruction of Mill's ethology based on advances in social science in the century and a half since his time.

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“…3. Fiona Woollard makes a similar point about the need to address the NIP in order to account for our mitigation obligations, despite the fact that our continuing to pollute may also negatively affect some people who would exist whether or not we continue to pollute (2012, 678).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human rights, harm, and climate change mitigation

Berkey

2017

Can. J. of Philosophy

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A number of philosophers have resisted impersonal explanations of our obligation to mitigate climate change, and have developed accounts according to which these obligations are explained by human rights or harm-based considerations. In this paper I argue that several of these attempts to explain our mitigation obligations without appealing to impersonal factors fail, since they either cannot account for a plausibly robust obligation to mitigate, or have implausible implications in other cases. I conclude that despite the appeal of the motivations for rejecting the appeal to impersonal factors, such factors must play a prominent role in explaining our mitigation obligations.

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Have We Solved the Non-Identity Problem?

Cited by 23 publications

References 8 publications

He Jiankui´s gene‐editing experiment and the non‐identity problem

He Jiankui´s gene‐editing experiment and the non‐identity problem

Situating human generations in Big History

Human rights, harm, and climate change mitigation

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