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Amos Wollen's avatar

Good article!

I’m skeptical of all attempts to solve the non-identity problem by non-standard conceptual analyses of HARM. Conceptual analysis won’t solve the core problem. In a slogan: the non-identity problem cannot be solved by definition.

Suppose we accept the following constraint on solutions to the non-identity problem: a solution to the non-identity problem should be rejected if it implies anti-natalism. (This constraint shouldn’t be respected dogmatically, or anything, but it should factor heavily in our deliberations.)

Given that constraint, it seems to me that all harm-based solutions to the non-identity problem should be rejected (at least provisionally) because they must either imply anti-natalism or be saddled with ad-hoc restrictions to avoid that implication.

Why think all harm-based solutions imply anti-natalism? Consider the following case:

BLIND CHILD, NO SIBLING: Wilma wants one child at most, but knows she’d get just as much life satisfaction from pursuing a certain career—and she can’t do both. If she has a child, the child will be blind.

I’m this case, it doesn’t seem like Wilma would wrong her child by conceiving her. Even if a non-standard account of HARM turned out to satisfy the concept HARM best, and thereby entailed that Wilma had harmed her child by conceiving him, that wouldn’t be a *wrongful* harm.

But in the standard (direct/same number) non-identity case, the only difference is that Wilma’s hobby is substituted for the conception of a sighted child. But whether some sighted child—who is not to blind child—would have been conceived if the blind child hadn’t been seems like it couldn’t transform Wilma’s (non-comparative) harming of her blind child into a wrongful harming.

One reason for thinking this is that the formal intuition just seems right. But for people who prefer case-specific intuitions, I think it can also be supported by cases. Consider, e.g.,

FERTILITY COACH: The case is the same as before, with one specification. One of the (short-term) careers Wilma would go into if she didn’t have a blind child is fertility coaching. She knows that if she goes into this profession, she’ll make possible the conception of a sighted child by a different couple of a different race six years later. (I add the “of a different race six years later” part to ward off the intuitional confusion Boonin warns about, where we allegedly have trouble holding the non-identity facts clear in our mind’s eye.)

In FERTILITY COACH, the counterfactual is (for all intents and purposes) the same as the in the standard non-identity case: *if* Wilma doesn’t conceive a blind child, *then* she will bring about the conception of a sighted child by another couple. But the truth of this counterfactual doesn’t seem like it could (or does) make it the case that Wilma wrongfully harms her blind child, rather than merely harming her in a non-comparative sense.

One might object that the counterfactual is different in the two cases—“will conceive” vs “will bring about the conception of”. But that seems like an irrelevant difference, and there are compelling arguments against solutions to the non-identity problem that try to make parental duties the issue.

Most of the energy directed at refuting harm based solutions to the non-identity problem comes in the form of giving counter-examples to this or that non-standard analysis of HARM (see Boonin’s book, Duncan Purves’ dissertation, etc.) But if this kind of blanket strategy works then that literature was probably unnecessary.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Good article! I think it’s all right!

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