Person-Affecting Utilitarianism

Author:

Bader Ralf M.

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with person-affecting views in population ethics which require the betterness ordering of populations to consist in betterness facts for the members of the populations and thereby require the evaluation of distributions to be reducible to facts about personal good. The first part argues that impersonal versions of utilitarianism involve an objectionable axiology precisely because they are incompatible with a person-affecting view. In particular, the problem is that they do not take personal good seriously, since they do not attribute ethical significance to it, but instead (at best) only consider it to be ethically relevant. As a result, they end up subordinating and sacrificing personal good for the sake of impersonal good and thereby treat persons as mere containers of impersonal good, which gives rise to particularly troubling implications in the case of variable-population comparisons. The second part evaluates the prospects for person-affecting versions of utilitarianism. It will be argued that person-affecting total utilitarianism presupposes comparativism, that is, that existence and non-existence are comparable in terms of personal good, and as such involves various problematic metaphysical commitments. Accordingly, same-number person-affecting utilitarianism turns out to be the only version of utilitarianism that neither has objectionable axiological implications nor requires problematic metaphysical commitments.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

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