Various authors have argued that in the future not only will it be technically feasible for human minds to be transferred to other substrates, but this will become, for most humans, the preferred option over the current biological limitations. It has even been claimed that such a scenario is inevitable in order to solve the challenging, but imperative, multi-agent value alignment problem. In all these considerations, it has been overlooked that, in order to create a suitable environment for a particular (...) mind – for example, a personal universe in a computational substrate – numerous other potentially sentient beings will have to be created. These range from non-player characters to subroutines. This article analyzes the additional suffering and mind crimes that these scenarios might entail. We offer a partial solution to reduce the suffering by imposing on the transferred mind the perception of indicators to measure potential suffering in non-player characters. This approach can be seen as implementing literal empathy through enhanced cognition. (shrink)

Roald Hoffmann's contributions to chemistry are well known; this Nobel laureate has published more than 500 articles and two books. As an "applied theoretical chemist," he has made significant contributions to our understanding of chemical bonding and reactivity, and taught two generations of chemists how to use molecular orbitals for real chemistry. Less well known, however, are Hoffmann's important and insightful contributions to the areas of scholarship surrounding chemistry. Over a career that spans nearly fifty years, Roald (...) class='Hi'>Hoffmann has thought and written copiously about the broader context of chemistry and its relationship to the arts and poetry. This book contains Hoffmann's essays and is organized around several major themes: chemical reasoning and explanation, writing and communicating in science, ethics, art and science, and chemical education. A few are unpublished lectures that are valuable additions to the volume. The editors have the full cooperation of Roald Hoffmann in this project. Most of the published work will be reprinted verbatim, but a few of the essays will be revised to eliminate redundancy. The unpublished lectures will also be edited since they were originally intended to be delivered orally at specific occasions. The editors will provide an introduction to the book, and some introductory material for each section. In introducing the material, they will highlight the intrinsic importance and interest of the ideas, as well as the places where Hoffmann's thought makes novel contributions to cognate areas. (shrink)

Author: Thomas Sören Hoffmann. Translated by Pedro Sepúlveda Zambrano.

In the context of network-ecological thought, information ethics is perhaps best understood as a transversal reflexive practice, aimed at identifying the stakes attending the creation, consumption, and disposal of infor-mation technologies. To situate itself as well as potential interlocutors, such a thought requires correspondingly complex cartographies, a multidimensional mapping of practices and presuppositions, of individual, collective, institutional actors as well as the conditions of possibility of their mutual engagement. Such cartographies do not assume the existence of the „local“ or the (...) „global“ as a given. Instead, they attend to the way human and non-human actors and the discursive and material practices they are involved in contribute to construction and reconstruction of geocultural formations. Reapproached from within such a „network-ecological“ horizon, information ethics becomes geophilosophy, generating new modalities of intervention in the conflictual dynamics associated with the social-economic life of waste. (shrink)

The vision of an internet of things, increasingly considered in the context of the “internet of everything”, calls for an ethics of technology driven less by the philosophical search for the essence of technology than by a transversal curiosity regarding processes of constitution. If growing interest in enhanced and expanded media literacy approaches facilitates ethical reflection, the scope of such reflection is related to the extent of our attention to and awareness of the immanence of our agency, our capacity for (...) relation in machinic assemblages that structure and sustain our communicative existences far beyond the sphere of signification. While the positions from which such reflection occurs are necessarily multiple, we can still respond to the distribution of agency with an aggregation of responsibility and the creation of a commons with greater attention to the vastness of the spatial and temporal scales of our situation. The idea of depletion design is both a concrete set of design strategies and an attempt to establish an experimental institutional object to facilitate and frame such ethico-aesthetic practice, an architecture for commoning that situates and affirms our ethical agency under the conditions of mediation. (shrink)

According to terror management theory, humans rely on meaningful and permanence-promising cultural worldviews, like religion, to manage mortality concerns. Prior research indicates that, compared to religious individuals, atheists experience lower levels of meaning in life following reminders of death. The present study investigated whether reminders of death would change atheists’ meaning in life after exposure to normative support for atheism. Atheists were either reminded of death or a control topic and exposed to information portraying atheism as either common or rare, (...) and then asked to rate their perceived meaning in life. Results showed that reminders of death reduced meaning in life among atheists who were told that atheism is common. Results were consistent with the view that atheism reflects the rejection of religious faith rather than a meaningful secular terror managing worldview. Discussion considers implications for maintaining healthy existential wellbeing, identifies limitations, and highlights future research directions. (shrink)

The chapter describes the sharing economy in Germany as a heterogeneous dynamic, combining local trends and histories with economic forms drawing on experiences mainly from across Europe and North America. Increasingly taken into account by policymakers in the regulation of markets and the redesign of innovation governance frameworks, “sharing” as a complex nexus linking the exercise of citizenship to sustainable consumption and informational self-determination in digital societies will continue to drive and frame the creation of value chains. Of particular interest (...) are linkages between sharing economies and the traditions of cooperativism, currently experiencing a renaissance. The latter is key because it shapes the context in which sharing economy initiatives exist and expand—an opening of definitions and narrative of innovation, of value, and of collaborative agency and cooperative management. (shrink)

In this book Tobias Hoffmann studies the medieval free will debate during its liveliest period, from the 1220s to the 1320s, and clarifies its background in Aristotle, Augustine, and earlier medieval thinkers. Among the wide range of authors he examines are not only well-known thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, but also a number of authors who were just as important in their time and deserve to be rediscovered today. To shed further light on (...) their theories of free will, Hoffmann also explores their competing philosophical explanations of the fall of the angels, that is, the hypothesis of an evil choice made by rational beings under optimal psychological conditions. As he shows, this test case imposed limits on tracing free choices to cognition. His book provides a comprehensive account of a debate that was central to medieval philosophy and continues to occupy philosophers today. (shrink)

Wicked problems—that is, problems that can be framed in a number of different ways, depending on who is looking at them—pose ethical challenges for professionals that have scarcely been recognized as such. Even though wicked problems are all around us, they are rarely addressed in education. A reason for this failure might be that wicked problems pose almost insurmountable challenges in educational settings. This contribution shows how students can learn to cope with wicked problems in problem-based learning projects that are (...) structured by the Reflect! platform. (shrink)

In 2006, the University of Maryland Carey School of Law had the privilege of co-hosting the annual Health Law Professors Conference with the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME). Coincidentally, as director of the Law & Health Care Program at Maryland, I had the opportunity to announce the winner of the Jay Healey Health Law Teachers’ Award at the conference. The award is given to “professors who have devoted a significant portion of their career to health law teaching (...) and whose selection would honor Jay [Healey’s] legacy through their passion for teaching health law, their mentoring of students and/or other faculty and by their being an inspiration to colleagues and students.”1 Healey, a Professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, was the youngest recipient of the Society’s Health Law Teachers’ Award, which he received in 1990. He was passionate about teaching and had the idea to devote a session each year at the annual conference to teaching health law. It was always a plenary session at which he challenged us to be better teachers. Jay died in 1993, at the age of 46, not long after the Health Law Teachers conference that year, which he attended and which also happened to be held in Baltimore at the University of Maryland School of Law. Thereafter, the award was given in his name. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Causes must be distinct from their effects. If the temperature in a room is 15°F, this can cause water pipes to freeze. However, the temperature’s being 15°F is not a cause of the temperature’s being below the freezing point. In general, conceptual, logical, mathematical, and other non-causal dependence relations should not be misclassified as causal. In this paper, I discuss how interventionist theories of causation can meet the challenge of distinguishing between (direct or indirect) causal relations and dependence relations (...) that are due to non-causal factors. I survey several approaches to solving this problem, and propose a novel criterion based on the notion of supervenience. According to this criterion, variables are sufficiently distinct to qualify as the relata of a causal relation iff they do not have overlapping minimal supervenience bases. (shrink)

Medieval authors generally agreed that we have the freedom to choose among alternative possibilities. But most medieval authors also thought that there are situations in which one cannot do otherwise, not even will otherwise. They also thought when willing necessarily, the will remains free. The questions, then, are what grounds the necessity or contingency of the will’s acts, and – since freedom is not defined by the ability to choose – what belongs to the essential character of freedom, the ratio (...) libertatis. This article studies medieval theories of freedom without choice from William of Auxerre to William of Ockham and their background in Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. (shrink)

A key challenge for probabilistic causal models is to distinguish non-causal probabilistic dependencies from true causal relations. To accomplish this task, causal models are usually required to satisfy several constraints. Two prominent constraints are the causal Markov condition and the faithfulness condition. However, other constraints are also needed. One of these additional constraints is the causal sufficiency condition, which states that models must not omit any direct common causes of the variables they contain. In this paper, I argue that the (...) causal sufficiency condition is problematic: (1) it is incompatible with the requirement that the variables in a model must not stand in non-causal necessary dependence relations, such as mathematical or conceptual relations, or relations described in terms of supervenience or grounding, (2) it presupposes more causal knowledge as primitive than is actually needed to create adequate causal models, and (3) if models are only required to be causally sufficient, they cannot deal with cases where variables are probabilistically related by accident, such as Sober’s example of the relationship between bread prices in England and the sea level in Venice. I show that these problems can be avoided if causal models are required to be monotonic in the following sense: the causal relations occurring in a model M would not disappear if further variables were added to M. I give a definition of this monotonicity condition and conclude that causal models should be required to be monotonic rather than causally sufficient. (shrink)

Martin Hoffmann bietet eine Grundlegung protestantischer Ethik im Schnittfeld von europäischer Ethiktradition und lateinamerikanischer Theologie. Orientiert an paulinischem Denken fragt er nach der ethischen Identität von Christen und Christinnen jenseits von Biblizismus und Relativismus. Er entwickelt den Weg zu einem adäquaten ethischen Urteil im jeweiligen Kontext und zeigt an ausgewählten Feldern materialer Ethik, wie eine ethische Hermeneutik im Horizont der globalen ethischen Herausforderungen der Gegenwart aussehen kann.

The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic account of the metaphysically important distinction between haecceitistic properties, such as being David Lewis or being acquainted with David Lewis, and qualitative properties, such as being red or being acquainted with a famous philosopher. I first argue that this distinction is hyperintensional, that is, that cointensional properties can differ in whether they are qualitative. Then I develop an analysis of the qualitative/haecceitistic distinction according to which haecceitistic properties are relational in (...) a certain sense. I argue that this analysis can capture the hyperintensionality of the qualitative/haecceitistic distinction and is generally in accordance with the use of the notion of a qualitative property in philosophical debates. (shrink)

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well-known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time. It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final (...) essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti-totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience. (shrink)

This book aims to develop a philosophical theory of extrinsic properties – of properties whose instantiation by an object does not only depend on what the object itself is like, but also on features of its environment. Various accounts of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction are analysed in detail, and it is argued that the most promising approach to defining this distinction is to consider extrinsic properties as a particular type of relational property. Moreover, it is shown that two key notions in (...) the metaphysics of properties, the supervenience relation and the dispositional/categorical distinction, whose scope is usually restricted to intrinsic properties, can fruitfully be applied to extrinsic properties as well. (shrink)

The role of uncertainty within an organization’s environment features prominently in the business ethics and management literature, but how corporate investment decisions should proceed in the face of uncertainties relating to the natural environment is less discussed. From the perspective of ecological economics, the salience of ecology-induced issues challenges management to address new types of uncertainties. These pertain to constraints within the natural environment as well as to institutional action aimed at conserving the natural environment. We derive six areas of (...) ecology-induced uncertainties and propose ecology-driven real options as a conceptual approach for systematically incorporating these uncertainties into strategic management. We combine our results in an integrative investment framework and illustrate its application with the case of carbon constraints. (shrink)

Among the many problems posed by Peirce's concept of abduction is how to determine the scope of this form of inference, and how to distinguish different types of abduction. This problem can be illustrated by taking a look at one of his best known definitions of the term:Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary (...) consequences of a pure hypothesis.The second half of this quote is not part of the definition, but an explanation of it. However, it adds something to this definition because it says implicitly that there are only three logical.. (shrink)

100 years ago, the editors of the Journal of Educational Psychology conducted one of the most famous studies of experts' conceptions of human intelligence. Reason enough to prompt the question where we stand today with conceptualizing 'intelligence'. In this paper, I provide a synopsis of the latest research on human intelligence(s). I embrace the notion of intelligence as a non-unitary faculty with pluralistic forms. Even though I do not provide a definition of 'intelligence' of my own, I provide good reasons (...) for this reluctance. Nonetheless, I specify the term as complex, gradual, embedded, multidirectional, and dynamic. Furthermore, I argue for the special status of musical, not linguistic, intelligence. (shrink)

It seems that every singular proposition implies that the object it is singular with respect to exists. It also seems that some propositions are true with respect to possible worlds in which they do not exist. The puzzle is that it can be argued that there is contradiction between these two principles. In this paper, I explain the puzzle and consider some of the ways one might attempt to resolve it. The puzzle is important because it has implications concerning the (...) way we think about the relationship between a proposition and the claim that the proposition is true. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz untersucht die Entwicklung von Kants Gewissenslehre, wie sie sich an Hand seiner Ethik-Vorlesungen zwischen 1764 und 1793-94 dokumentieren läßt. Anfangs ausgehend von einer Lehre vom "unteilbaren" moralischen Gefühl, gelangt Kant im Verfolg seines kritischen Ansatzes zuletzt zu einer Lehre vom Gewissen als praktischer, alle Handlungen begleitender Apperzeption. Damit ist die Brücke zwischen der ethischen, Maximen prüfenden Vernunft einerseits und dem wirklichen Dasein des Individuums geschlagen: Gewissen ist selbst keine Normquelle, wohl aber der effektive Vollzug eines expliziten Selbstverhältnisses des (...) Subjekts in Beziehung auf seine Handlungen. (shrink)

From the early reception of Thomas Aquinas up to the present, many have interpreted his theory of liberum arbitrium to imply intellectual determinism: we do not control our choices, because we do not control the practical judgments that cause our choices. In this paper we argue instead that he rejects determinism in general and intellectual determinism in particular, which would effectively destroy liberum arbitrium as he conceives of it. We clarify that for Aquinas moral responsibility presupposes liberum arbitrium and thus (...) the ability to do otherwise, although the ability to do otherwise applies differently to praise and blame. His argument against intellectual determinism is not straightforward, but we construct it by analogy to his arguments against other deterministic threats. The non-determinism of the intellect’s causality with respect to the will results from his claims that practical reasoning is defeasible and that the reasons for actions are not contrastive reasons. (shrink)

As a committee of the National Academy of Engineering recognized, ethics education should foster the ability of students to analyze complex decision situations and ill-structured problems. Building on the NAE’s insights, we report about an innovative teaching approach that has two main features: first, it places the emphasis on deliberation and on self-directed, problem-based learning in small groups of students; and second, it focuses on understanding ill-structured problems. The first innovation is motivated by an abundance of scholarly research that supports (...) the value of deliberative learning practices. The second results from a critique of the traditional case-study approach in engineering ethics. A key problem with standard cases is that they are usually described in such a fashion that renders the ethical problem as being too obvious and simplistic. The practitioner, by contrast, may face problems that are ill-structured. In the collaborative learning environment described here, groups of students use interactive and web-based argument visualization software called “AGORA-net: Participate – Deliberate!”. The function of the software is to structure communication and problem solving in small groups. Students are confronted with the task of identifying possible stakeholder positions and reconstructing their legitimacy by constructing justifications for these positions in the form of graphically represented argument maps. The argument maps are then presented in class so that these stakeholder positions and their respective justifications become visible and can be brought into a reasoned dialogue. Argument mapping provides an opportunity for students to collaborate in teams and to develop critical thinking and argumentation skills. (shrink)

Establishing acceptable norms of behavior and consistent standards of conduct has been part of the human enterprise since the dawn of time. Without principles of ethics and the moral rules that affect individual behavior, humankind would plunge into a state of chaotic indifference, insecurity, and unending fear. But while few question the need for moral guidance, a growing number of people believe that the only ethic worth considering must rest on a biblical foundation. Is morality dependent upon God and "revealed (...) truths" found in scripture? Must this claim be accepted without question lest we risk the torment of eternal damnation for questioning it? Without critical evaluation and careful scrutiny, there is little hope of distinguishing truth from unfounded belief. How valuable is the Bible as a source for ethical truth? Do the scriptures truly have the insight needed to guide humankind safely through the moral dilemmas of modern society? What constitutes a biblical ethic? Should the Bible be construed as the only basis for moral teaching? Is it really the final authority on moral issues, or are there secular alternatives that can serve as guides to acceptable conduct within the human community? A distinguished group of social philosophers, biblical scholars, and ethicists met at the University of Richmond, Virginia, under the aegis of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion and its Biblical Criticism Research Project, to address these and related questions. The essays in this provocative work demonstrate a diversity of perspective and breadth of insight that will shed much needed light on the nature of ethics. The contributors to this volume include: Robert S. Alley, Joe Edward Barnhart, Joseph L. Blau, Frank E. Eakin, Jr., Lewis S. Feuer, Joseph Fletcher, Theodor H. Gaster, James H. Hall, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Paul Kurtz, Gerald A. Larue, John Priest, Ellis Rivkin, Richard L. Rubenstein, and Richard Taylor. (shrink)

A significant amount of discussion in the bioethics community has been devoted to the question of whether individuals performing ethics consultations in healthcare institutions have any special expertise. In addition, articles in the lay press have questioned the “added value” that bioethicists bring to ethical dilemmas. Those at the forefront of the bioethics community have argued repeatedly that those doing ethics consults cannot simply be well-intentioned individuals, that some training in bioethics, group process, and facilitation is necessary to competently execute (...) a consult. As one bioethicist commented:if you approach any endeavor as an amateur activity, you will get, in the end, an amateurish version of the activity. Without a sufficient commitment of personnel, time, support, and financial resources, a healthcare organization will get the ‘ethics’ program … it set out to create: an inept, unskilled, inefficient, and highly risky ‘program’ in healthcare ethics and bioethics. (shrink)

None would doubt that medieval Europeans ate fish and that they fished for food. But did they also fish for fun? as a pastime? as sport? Not in the generally accepted view of the supposed evidence. But newly discovered, recently rediscovered, and simply reread manuscript and printed sources from several areas of Europe show that medieval Europeans did on occasion think of fishing as a leisure activity, pursued for pleasure and not just as a means of subsistence.

Had more philosophers of science come from chemistry, their thinking would have been different. I begin by looking at a typical chemical paper, in which making something is the leitmotif, and conjecture/refutation is pretty much irrelevant. What in fact might have been, might be, different? The realism of chemists is reinforced by their remarkable ability to transform matter; they buy into reductionism where it serves them, but make no real use of it. Incommensurability is taken without a blink, and actually (...) serves. The preeminence of synthesis in chemistry could have led philosophers of science to take more seriously questions of aesthetics within science, and to find a place in aesthetics for utility. The necessary motion twixt macroscopic and microscopic views of matter in modern chemistry leads to the coexistence of symbolic and iconic representations. And in another way to the deliberate, creative violation of categories. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to argue that there is indeterminacy in causation. I present three types of cases in which it is indeterminate whether an event c caused another event e: (1) cases of absence causation recently discussed by Bernstein and by Swanson, (2) cases leading to Sorites paradoxes for causation, and (3) cases where c and e occur in certain indeterministic causal structures and it is therefore indeterminate whether there is a causal relation between them. These cases, (...) I argue, provide strong evidence that indeterminacy is an important general feature of the causal relation and that philosophical theorizing about causation should take this observation into account. (shrink)

Public officials rely on performance data that are self-reported by organizations to evaluate progress on a wide range of prosocial outcomes. Policies that require public disclosure of performance in health care are thought to enable patients to select high-quality providers, which in turn may spur quality improvements as providers seek to protect their reputation or increase economic returns. Drawing on institutional theory that examines how conflicting institutional pressures influence organizational decisions, we theorize how profit orientation may mediate the response of (...) health care providers to disclosure mandates in a public health crisis. We focus on measures of data quality—completeness and accuracy—in self-reported data on COVID-19 status and outcomes generated by thousands of long-term care facilities. Using pooled regressions and a difference-in-differences style design, we find that overall, for-profit and not-for-profit facilities report similarly complete data but that for-profit facilities report less accurate data than their not-for-profit counterparts. Our results suggest that it may be important to incentivize each dimension of data quality separately to address differential institutional pressures that affect reporting practices. (shrink)

Languages are complex systems that allow speakers to produce novel grammatical utterances. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract they think the mental representation of speakers have to be to give rise to this grammatical creativity. In order to shed light on these questions, the present study looks at one specific construction type, English comparative correlatives, that turns out to be particularly interesting in this context: on the one hand it has been described in terms of one of (...) the most abstract and general syntactic rules, on the other hand it shows specific idiomatic structures that are often produced without any variation. While the syntax and semantics of the English Comparative Correlative construction have received considerable attention in the literature, so far only a small number of usage-based analyses have been published on the topic. These either only relied on small databases or focussed only on the productivity of one slot in the construction. In contrast to this, the present study analyses more than 1,400 CC tokens sampled from COCA. The results of the present study yield important results concerning English CC constructions, including the schematicity and generality of their mental representations. (shrink)

Gegenüber der in den letzten Jahrzehnten wiederholt vorgetragenen Kritik an der lange vorherrschenden Auffassung, dass erstmalig bei Aristoteles der Gedanke einer „Axiomatisierung“ wissenschaftlichen Wissens formuliert sei, ist es ein erstes Ziel des Artikels, die traditionelle Auffassung teilweise zu rehabilitieren, sie dabei aber weiter zu präzisieren. Ausgangspunkt dazu ist eine erst seit Hilbert üblich gewordene Unterscheidung zweier ganz verschiedener Auffassungen von Axiomatisierung: einer „logisch-analytischen“ und einer „modelltheoretischen“. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Unterscheidung wird erstens gezeigt, dass man Aristoteles als den Begründer der (...) „logisch-analytischen“ Auffassung ansehen kann. Zweitens wird dafür argumentiert, dass in der vermutlich pseudo-platonischen „Epinomis“ eine „modelltheoretische“ Sicht der Axiomatisierung angedeutet ist. Ausgehend davon wird schließlich gezeigt, wie diese modelltheoretische Auffassung von Axiomatisierung zur Grundlage für ein neues Verständnis der in der Politeia diskutierten „Idee des Guten“ gemacht werden kann. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a description of the role of body-part terms in expressions of emotion and other semantic extensions in MalakMalak, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the Daly River area. Body-based expressions denote events, emotions, personality traits, significant places and people and are used to refer to times and number. Particularly central in the language aremen‘stomach’,pundu‘head’ andtjewurr‘ear’ associated respectively with basic emotions, states of mind and reason. The figurative extensions of these body parts are discussed systematically, and compared with (...) what is known for other languages of the Daly River region. The article also explores the grammatical make up of body-based emotional collocations, and in particular the role of noun incorporation. In MalakMalak, noun incorporation is a central part of forming predicates with body parts, but uncommon in any other semantic domain of the language and only lexemes denoting basic emotions may also incorporate closed-class adjectives. (shrink)

My students tend to rank Parfit’s Energy Policy and the Further Future1 among their favourite pieces. It is a marvellously argued, eye-opening paper. One of the most interesting passages comes right at the end, when Parfit suggests that we should act as if we had never realised that the non-identity problem exists: “When we are discussing social policies, should we ignore the point about personal identity? Should we allow ourselves to say that a choice like that of the Risky Policy (...) or of Depletion might be against the interests of people in the further future? This is not true. Should we pretend that it is? […] I would not want people to conclude that we can be less concerned about the more remote effects of our social policies. So I would be tempted to suppress the argument for this conclusion.” (2010 [1983], 119) In the paper, Parfit continuously stresses the implications of our views on personal identity. He differentiates between what he later, in his Reasons and Persons, calls a “narrow” and a “wide” person-affecting view (1984, ch. 18).2 On a narrow person-affecting view, we take seriously each person’s identity and assume that it is determined by its genome which is a product of a certain ovum and a certain sperm cell (112-113). On this view, we may then evaluate an action by considering its impact on each individual that is affected. An action is, thus, better or worse because it is better or worse for someone. Consequently, there may be alternative actions available to perform that seem better or worse, but aren’t really, as they are not better or worse for someone. One example that illustrates this point is the case of a 14 year-old who decides to have a child and, due to her age, gives the boy she conceives a bad start in life (113). In response, one may want to argue that she should have had a child later and that that child would have had a better start in life. This, however, overlooks that the boy that has been born to the young mother could not have been born later: the child she actually had could only come into existence because she decided to become a mother when she was 14. Hence, Parfit argues, we can “not claim that, in having this child, what she did was worse for him” (113, italics in the original). (shrink)

Proceedings of the conference Fichtes Geschlossener Handelsstaat -- èuber Ort und Ortlosigkeit der èOkonomie im transzendentalen System, held in Berlin, 28-30 November, 2014.