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.
Very interesting stuff. I'm curious if you've ever read Clark Wolf's paper "Do Future Persons Presently Have Alternate Possible Identities?" It seems like his approach would be another way of diffusing some of these difficulties. I'm not convinced we need to think about Harry and Moe as two distinct persons in situations like these, as opposed to two possible alternate identities that one future person might share. In that case, there would be a very straightforward explanation for why choosing to create Moe - which would really just be choosing to make sure some future person becomes Moe and not Harry - is suboptimal. But of course the plausibility of this analysis depends on what process is involved in creating the two; there might be some situations where there is no candidate for a single future person who has both identities as an "option."
Thanks for the pointer, I'll have to check that out! Off the top of my head, I would think it hard to deny that there can be genuine non-identity cases. For example, if I imagine my parents conceiving their third child in a different month from how things actually turned out, I shouldn't think, "Wow, I could have had completely different DNA!" I should think, "Wow, my parents so easily could have had a *different* child -- perhaps a daughter, for example -- in my place."
That's interesting, I don't share the same intuition - if I imagine my parents conceiving a few months later, then it does seem to me that I would just have been born in a different month. My DNA would be different in many respects, but I can easily imagine my DNA being different now without being a different person, so that doesn't raise any concerns for me. On the other hand, bringing up the fact that the child born at that time could have been a daughter does complicate things - I don't think I would be my parent's daughter in that case, although that doesn't seem crazy to me either. As a physicalist, I would at least hold out conceptual hope that this is an empirical question, and that we could one day identify a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for the establishment of one particular first-person perspective versus another.
Either way, I still think you can set those metaphysical concerns aside and simply argue that moral questions only relate to third-person designations rather than specific claims about identity. I think Wolf uses the example of a will that leaves everything to "the deceased's second child." If I illegally void that will, then it seems like the person I've harmed is whoever the phrase 'the deceased's second child'" happens to refer to, which could be any number of individuals depending on various contingent factors. We could take the same perspective in depletion situations; we've harmed "the future generation that comes into being at such-and-such a time" and that's enough of a stable designator that we don't need to worry about the contingent identities of the people it happens to pick out. We're still just harming one set of entities from that third-person perspective. This approach doesn't alleviate every single issue you raise, but I think it's a promising approach.
And I have the strong intuition that there's no single fact corresponding to the English sentences "I (would/wouldn't) be the same person", just as with the Ship of Theseus. We could talk about all the physical similarities and the differences, and then choose some subset to apply to our use of the identity verb, but then that's it.
I think it's reasonable believe there's some definite fact about what first-person perspective is experiencing what, but I agree that identity in the third-person sense is probably vague. It can't just be about a particular DNA set - if my father's DNA changed slightly in some way, I wouldn't suddenly think I had a different person for a father. But some changes do seem to make someone a completely different person. It's hard to see what the principled line could be.
That was great to read through. Reasons and Persons was one of the first philosophy books I ever read, and this reminds me that I could probably use reading it again. Cool series to do.
This accords with my intuitions as well; it also seems to fit well with a modified version of Meacham's saturating counterpart relations. In Meacham's version, you effectively regard every pair of people in the Cartesian product of the two possible worlds as potential alternate identities.
But I think the suggestion above leads to a more natural version: instead of every injection between people in the two worlds, you only consider injections that respect some kind of "possible alternate identity" relation between the two worlds. And I agree with the intuition that sharing certain relevant third party descriptions is the sort of "possible alternate identity" you'd need to respect.
I'm not sure I understand the question. I think harm is conceptually reducible to facts about an *individual's* welfare. Wronging is conceptually distinct (maybe instead reducible to facts about when an individual can reasonably resent you), but I think is plausibly grounded in facts about welfare as a matter of substantive first-order ethics (about which someone could take a different view without being *conceptually* confused).
In regard to the brain computer interface and policy decision; does the patient's opinion matter? You could argue that a patient would be happy to contribute to r&d that might help others.
Or is it about policy choices "forcing" a decision by limiting the option space?
Being against consentual pro tanto harms seem absurd, then we could go on a witch hunt targeted at personal trainers for inducing post workout soreness. I hope this is a strawman.
I don't think anyone is against all consensual pro tanto harms. The view would just be that there are some sufficiently *severe* ones that even consent cannot make permissible.
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.
Ok I expanded on this here https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/the-non-identity-problem-cannot-be?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Good article! I think it’s all right!
To be clear, I was saying all the points are right, not merely that it's alright, as in a synonym of okay.
Very interesting stuff. I'm curious if you've ever read Clark Wolf's paper "Do Future Persons Presently Have Alternate Possible Identities?" It seems like his approach would be another way of diffusing some of these difficulties. I'm not convinced we need to think about Harry and Moe as two distinct persons in situations like these, as opposed to two possible alternate identities that one future person might share. In that case, there would be a very straightforward explanation for why choosing to create Moe - which would really just be choosing to make sure some future person becomes Moe and not Harry - is suboptimal. But of course the plausibility of this analysis depends on what process is involved in creating the two; there might be some situations where there is no candidate for a single future person who has both identities as an "option."
Thanks for the pointer, I'll have to check that out! Off the top of my head, I would think it hard to deny that there can be genuine non-identity cases. For example, if I imagine my parents conceiving their third child in a different month from how things actually turned out, I shouldn't think, "Wow, I could have had completely different DNA!" I should think, "Wow, my parents so easily could have had a *different* child -- perhaps a daughter, for example -- in my place."
That's interesting, I don't share the same intuition - if I imagine my parents conceiving a few months later, then it does seem to me that I would just have been born in a different month. My DNA would be different in many respects, but I can easily imagine my DNA being different now without being a different person, so that doesn't raise any concerns for me. On the other hand, bringing up the fact that the child born at that time could have been a daughter does complicate things - I don't think I would be my parent's daughter in that case, although that doesn't seem crazy to me either. As a physicalist, I would at least hold out conceptual hope that this is an empirical question, and that we could one day identify a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for the establishment of one particular first-person perspective versus another.
Either way, I still think you can set those metaphysical concerns aside and simply argue that moral questions only relate to third-person designations rather than specific claims about identity. I think Wolf uses the example of a will that leaves everything to "the deceased's second child." If I illegally void that will, then it seems like the person I've harmed is whoever the phrase 'the deceased's second child'" happens to refer to, which could be any number of individuals depending on various contingent factors. We could take the same perspective in depletion situations; we've harmed "the future generation that comes into being at such-and-such a time" and that's enough of a stable designator that we don't need to worry about the contingent identities of the people it happens to pick out. We're still just harming one set of entities from that third-person perspective. This approach doesn't alleviate every single issue you raise, but I think it's a promising approach.
And I have the strong intuition that there's no single fact corresponding to the English sentences "I (would/wouldn't) be the same person", just as with the Ship of Theseus. We could talk about all the physical similarities and the differences, and then choose some subset to apply to our use of the identity verb, but then that's it.
I think it's reasonable believe there's some definite fact about what first-person perspective is experiencing what, but I agree that identity in the third-person sense is probably vague. It can't just be about a particular DNA set - if my father's DNA changed slightly in some way, I wouldn't suddenly think I had a different person for a father. But some changes do seem to make someone a completely different person. It's hard to see what the principled line could be.
A post on personal identity, if you're interested: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/do-you-really-exist-over-time
That was great to read through. Reasons and Persons was one of the first philosophy books I ever read, and this reminds me that I could probably use reading it again. Cool series to do.
This accords with my intuitions as well; it also seems to fit well with a modified version of Meacham's saturating counterpart relations. In Meacham's version, you effectively regard every pair of people in the Cartesian product of the two possible worlds as potential alternate identities.
But I think the suggestion above leads to a more natural version: instead of every injection between people in the two worlds, you only consider injections that respect some kind of "possible alternate identity" relation between the two worlds. And I agree with the intuition that sharing certain relevant third party descriptions is the sort of "possible alternate identity" you'd need to respect.
Do you believe that harm and wronging are independent moral facts, ie, they can't be grounded in other kinds of facts about net welfare etc?
I guess I'm asking why I shouldn't take these paradoxes as a modus tollens to reject those concepts entirely?
I'm not sure I understand the question. I think harm is conceptually reducible to facts about an *individual's* welfare. Wronging is conceptually distinct (maybe instead reducible to facts about when an individual can reasonably resent you), but I think is plausibly grounded in facts about welfare as a matter of substantive first-order ethics (about which someone could take a different view without being *conceptually* confused).
In regard to the brain computer interface and policy decision; does the patient's opinion matter? You could argue that a patient would be happy to contribute to r&d that might help others.
Or is it about policy choices "forcing" a decision by limiting the option space?
Being against consentual pro tanto harms seem absurd, then we could go on a witch hunt targeted at personal trainers for inducing post workout soreness. I hope this is a strawman.
I don't think anyone is against all consensual pro tanto harms. The view would just be that there are some sufficiently *severe* ones that even consent cannot make permissible.