The non-identity puzzle

: which solution should we favour?

Abstract

Over the past 15,000 years, a societal shift from small nomadic groups to large social networks has pushed us towards more cosmopolitan outlooks. Our moral consideration of future persons reflects perhaps the furthest reaches of this cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately, at these outer reaches, intuitions shaped by evolutionary processes in our ancestral environments are not always fit for purpose. This is doubly unfortunate given that climate change, as one of the biggest threats we face, calls for sturdy beliefs about the moral status of future persons. Non-identity cases illuminate the instability of some moral beliefs relating to environmental depletion and wrongful life. These cases tease out mutually inconsistent intuitions we appear to have with respect to people who are, by our acts, both caused to exist and to have worthwhile yet necessarily flawed lives (Roberts, 2019). Since Derek Parfit, James Woodward and Gregory Kavka popularised the puzzle in the 1980s (Parfit, 1986; Kavka, 1982; Woodward, 1986), a myriad of solutions has been proposed. I argue in favour of a novel account that hybridises aspects of two impersonal theories; the totalising and averaging principles.

Date of Award	1 May 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Clayton Littlejohn (Supervisor)