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The Unthinkable Conclusion: Derek Parfit’s Budding Antinatalism
Matti Häyry
Journal:

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics / Volume 34 / Issue 3 / July 2025

Published online by Cambridge University Press:

30 October 2024, pp. 479-488
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Derek Parfit famously opined that causing a person to exist with a life barely worth living can be wrong, although it is not wrong for that person. This conundrum is known as the nonidentity problem. Parfit also held that persons can, in a morally relevant sense, be caused to exist in the distant future by actions that make the agent a necessary condition for a person’s existence. When these views are combined, which he did, and applied explicitly to persons with a life not worth living, which he did not, an interesting conditional conclusion can be drawn. If every family line eventually produces a person with a life not worth living, and if causing that person to exist cannot be justified by the benefits befalling others in the family line, it is always wrong to have children. Parfit did not draw this antinatalist conclusion, but an analysis of his introduction of the nonidentity problem shows that he could have. Since Parfit’s other views on population ethics continue to be discussed with relative respect, it stands to reason that the antinatalist position should be no exception. Right or wrong, it has its legitimate place in considerations concerning the future of reproduction.

Feargal Cochrane. Belfast: The Story of a City and its People New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 320. $30.00 (cloth).
S. J. Connolly
Journal:

Journal of British Studies / Volume 63 / Issue 4 / October 2024

Published online by Cambridge University Press:

30 October 2024, pp. 941-942
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The Unthinkable Conclusion: Derek Parfit’s Budding Antinatalism

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