Person-Affecting and Non-Identity

Abstract

According to a popular version of the person-affecting idea of morality, what is better (worse) must be better (worse) for someone. However, there seems to be a clear tension between this idea and some of our considered judgements about cases in which the existence of future people is contingent on our choice. For example, we want to say that creating a very unhappy person makes the world worse, other things being equal. In order to comply with a person-affecting morality in this case, we need to show that coming into existence can be worse for a person, but it does not seem plausible to say that it can be worse for a person to exist than not to exist. This paper discusses some recent attempts to ease this tension, and it is argued that none of these attempts is convincing. That leaves us with only one option: to reject the person-affecting constraint in its current form.