A person-affecting or person-based view (also called person-affecting restrictionGustaf Arrhenius. "The Person-Affecting Restriction, Comparativism, and the Moral Status of Potential People". 2003. https://www.iffs.se/media/2287/the-person-affecting-restriction-comparativism-and-the-moral-status-of-potential-people.pdf) in

population ethics Population ethics is the philosophical study of the ethical problems arising when our actions affect ''who'' is born and ''how many'' people are born in the future. An important area within population ethics is population axiology, which is "the st ...

captures the intuition that an act can only be bad if it is bad ''for'' someone.Roberts, M. A., "The Nonidentity Problem", ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/ Similarly something can be good only if it is good ''for'' someone. Therefore, according to standard person-affecting views, there is no moral obligation to create people nor moral good in creating people because nonexistence means "there is never a person who could have benefited from being created". Whether one accepts person-affecting views greatly influences to what extent shaping the far future is important if there are more potential humans in the future. Person-affecting views are also important in considering

human population control Human population planning is the practice of intentionally controlling the growth rate of a human population. The practice, traditionally referred to as population control, had historically been implemented mainly with the goal of increasing po ...

. A weaker form of person-affecting views states that an act can only be bad if it is bad for some existing or future person. Person-affecting views can be seen as a revision of total utilitarianism in which the "scope of the aggregation" is changed from all individuals who would exist to a subset of those individuals (though the details of this vary, see the section below). Some philosophers who have discussed person-affecting views include

Derek Parfit Derek Antony Parfit (; 11 December 1942 – 1 or 2 January 2017) was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of ...

Jan Narveson Jan Narveson (; born 1936) is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An anarcho-capitalist and contractarian, Narveson's ideology is deeply influenced by the thought of Robert Nozick and Da ...

, John Broome, Jeff McMahan,

Larry Temkin Larry Temkin is an American philosopher specializing in normative ethics and political philosophy. His research into equality, practical reason, and the nature of the good has been very influential. His work on the intransitivity of the "all thing ...

Tatjana Višak Tatjana Višak (born 12 December 1974), often credited as Tatjana Visak, is a German philosopher specialising in ethics and political philosophy who is currently based in the Department of Philosophy and Business Ethics at the University of Mannhe ...

, Gustaf Arrhenius, Johann Frick, Nick Beckstead, and

Hilary Greaves Hilary Greaves (born 1978) is a British philosopher, currently serving as professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and director of the Global Priorities Institute, a research centre for effective altruism at that university supported ...

Variants

There is no single "person-affecting view" but rather a variety of formulations all involving the idea of something being good or bad ''for'' someone. * Gustaf Arrhenius formulates the "person-affecting restriction" as saying that moral claims "necessarily involve a reference to humans", so that statements only referencing "the scenery" or "the balance of the ecosystem" (without reference to humans) are excluded from moral consideration. * Nick Beckstead states that the person-affecting view claims the following: "When aggregating the interests of different people to determine the value of an outcome, the interests of 'extra' people count for less or can be ignored" (where "extra" can mean different things in different contexts, but in each case actions cannot be good or bad ''for'' "extra" people). * Beckstead further distinguishes between ''moderate'' and ''strict'' person-affecting views, where moderate views give less weight to "extra" people (so that while creating new lives that are good is a good thing, this is inferior to improving already-existing lives) while strict views do not consider "extra" people at all. * Larry Temkin has developed a ''"narrow person-affecting view"'' on which " assessing possible outcomes, one should (1) focus on the status of independently existing people, with the aim of wanting them to be as well off as possible, and (2) ignore the status of dependently existing people, except that one wants to avoid harming them as much as possible."

Asymmetric Person-Affecting Views

There are also '' asymmetric'' views, according to which it is considered bad or wrong to bring into this world lives that are not worth living, even though it is morally neutral to bring into this world lives that are worth living. Hard asymmetric views in particular can lead one to conclude that

human extinction Human extinction, also known as omnicide, is the hypothetical end of the human species due to either natural causes such as population decline from sub-replacement fertility, an asteroid impact, or large-scale volcanism, or to anthropogenic ...

(or the extinction of all life) is good, according to Beckstead. However, according to Simon Knutsson, this can be the case for

utilitarianism In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different charact ...

and

consequentialism In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a ...

generally, not just asymmetric consequentialist theories, like

negative utilitarianism Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that they should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the tota ...

and

negative consequentialism Negative consequentialism is a version of consequentialism, which is "one of the major theories of normative ethics." Like other versions of consequentialism, negative consequentialism holds that moral right and wrong depend only on the value of ou ...

. Soft asymmetric views, like described by Teruji Thomas, hold that additional lives worth living can make up for bad lives, but once the bad lives are made up for, more lives worth living do not improve the outcome. These are less prone to the conclusion that extinction is good than hard asymmetric views.

References

{{reflist Population ethics

Variants

Asymmetric Person-Affecting Views

See also

References