What is the non-identity effect?
a child until she is older, this will not result in the same child being born later. Rather, a different child will be born. This is the non-identity effect. Almost no one challenges this claim it is essentially an empirical claim about human biology.
What is the problem Derek Parfit famously called the non-identity problem?
The first is what Parfit called the ‘person-affecting principle,’ which holds that impersonal actions have no moral weight, good or bad, because they do not help or harm any specific individuals. Accordingly, our moral decisions should only be based on person-affecting considerations.
Was Derek Parfit a utilitarian?
Parfit was thus a utilitarian, in the sense that ethical preference should be given to greater numbers, even if that implies a reduction of our self interest. He hoped for impartial and impersonal ethics. But, Parfit was also critical of utilitarianism.
What is a non-identity case?
In a typical non-identity case, the agent performs an action that causes someone to exist at a low but positive level of well-being, although an alternative was to create another, much happier person instead.
What is contrast identity?
The sociological notion of identity, by contrast, has to do with a person’s self-conception, social presentation, and more generally, the aspects of a person that make them unique, or qualitatively different from others (e.g. cultural identity, gender identity, national identity, online identity and processes of …
What is the non-identity problem simple?
The nonidentity problem (also called the paradox of future individuals) in population ethics is the problem that an act may still be wrong even if it is not wrong for anyone.
What is Derek Parfit view on personal identity?
He is a “reductionist,” according to which the facts about persons and personal identity consist in more particular facts about brains, bodies, and series of interrelated mental and physical events (Parfit 1984, 210–211).
How does parfit define personal identity?
Parfit ends up concluding that personal identity is not what matters. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness. We can still talk about personal identity, but it will just be a convention. We can call teletransportation dying, or not.
Was Parfit an atheist?
Parfit is an atheist, but when it comes to moral truth he believes what Ivan Karamazov believed about God: if it does not exist, then everything is permitted.
What are the three claims thought to be inconsistent by the problem of non-identity?
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 …