Non-Identity for Non-Humans

Purves, Duncan; Hale, Benjamin

doi:10.1007/s10677-016-9752-3

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…60 Such a view is developed by Jeff McMahan (personal communication) in unpublished work, and suggested by the common talk of person-affecting morality, not to mention person-affecting views that directly appeal to personhood. For discussion, see Purves & Hale (2016). 61 Kahane (2019).…”

Section: Could It Have Been Significantly Better Impersonally Speaking?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Was evolution worth it?

Kahane

2022

Philos Stud

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The evolutionary process involved the suffering of quadrillions of sentient beings over millions of years. I argue that when we take this into account, then it is likely that when the first humans appeared, the world was already at an enormous axiological deficit, and that even on favorable assumptions about humanity, it is doubtful that we have overturned this deficit or ever will. Even if there’s no such deficit or we can overturn it, it remains the case that everything of value associated with humanity was made possible by our evolutionary history and all that animal suffering. It can seem indecent to regard all that past suffering as having been worth it simply because it was a causal precondition for our existence. But when we consider the realistic alternatives to the way evolution in fact unfolded, there is nevertheless a conditional case for regarding past sentient suffering as a kind of necessary evil.

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Section: Could It Have Been Significantly Better Impersonally Speaking?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Was evolution worth it?

Kahane

2022

Philos Stud

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“…The Non-Identity Problem, in contrast, is a special obstacle to "narrow person-affecting" axiologies, according to which a change in a population cannot be worse for that population if it is worse for no one in that population (see, e.g., Parfit 2017) Purves and Hale (2016). andSebo (2022) discuss some implications of the Non-Identity Problem in multispecies context.…”

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confidence: 99%

Towards A Multispecies Population Ethics

Kyllönen¹

2022

Environmental Ethics

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Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested.

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Nonanthropocentric climate ethics

Nolt,

Hedberg

2024

WIREs Climate Change

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Anthropogenic climate change poses increasingly severe long‐term threats to living things worldwide. It may even contribute to a mass extinction that would leave biodiversity depleted for millions of years—quite possibly longer than the duration of the human species. Such effects are obviously of ethical concern, but because traditional ethical theories have focused on the relatively short‐term interests of human beings, they offer little guidance. In the late 20th century, a growing number of ethical activists and theorists sought to expand moral consideration to nonhuman animals and to the diverse life forms and habitats of wild nature. Simultaneously and at first independently, others began to develop long‐term (sometimes called “intergenerational”) ethics, which extends moral consideration into the distant future. Concerns about future climate change quickly became a central focus of this work. But only in this century have there been concerted efforts to integrate these lines of thought into far‐sighted nonanthropocentric climate ethics. These efforts are the subject of this review.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change Integrated Assessment of Climate Change > Assessing Climate Change in the Context of Other Issues Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Comparative Environmental Values

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Non-Identity for Non-Humans

Cited by 4 publications

References 38 publications

Was evolution worth it?

Was evolution worth it?

Towards A Multispecies Population Ethics

Nonanthropocentric climate ethics

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