Richard—interesting post. I think this hybrid approach seems more or less reasonable.
I do think the dichotomy between ‘person-directed’ and ‘undirected’ concerns is a bit artificial, and it glosses over some intermediate cases in ways that over-simplify the population ethics.
Specifically, any given couple considering whether to have children, or whether to allow a particular fetus to reach term (versus aborting it), is not exactly facing a dilemma about a currently existing person with particular traits—but they aren’t exactly facing an ‘undirected’ dilemma about whether to add another vague abstract genetic person to the total population either.
Rather, they’re facing a decision about whether to create a person who’s likely to have certain heritable traits that represent some Mendelian combination of their genes. They’re facing a somewhat stochastic distribution of possible traits in the potential offspring, and that complicates the ethics. But when assessing the value of any existing life (e.g. the kid at risk of malaria who might live another 50 years if they survive), we’re also facing a somewhat stochastic distribution of possible future traits that might emerge decades in the future.
In other words, pace Derek Parfit, there might be almost as much genetic and psychological continuity between parent and child as between person X at time Y and person X at time Y + many decades. In neither case does the ‘person-directed’ thinking quite capture the malleable nature of human identity within lives and across generations.
Richard—interesting post. I think this hybrid approach seems more or less reasonable.
I do think the dichotomy between ‘person-directed’ and ‘undirected’ concerns is a bit artificial, and it glosses over some intermediate cases in ways that over-simplify the population ethics.
Specifically, any given couple considering whether to have children, or whether to allow a particular fetus to reach term (versus aborting it), is not exactly facing a dilemma about a currently existing person with particular traits—but they aren’t exactly facing an ‘undirected’ dilemma about whether to add another vague abstract genetic person to the total population either.
Rather, they’re facing a decision about whether to create a person who’s likely to have certain heritable traits that represent some Mendelian combination of their genes. They’re facing a somewhat stochastic distribution of possible traits in the potential offspring, and that complicates the ethics. But when assessing the value of any existing life (e.g. the kid at risk of malaria who might live another 50 years if they survive), we’re also facing a somewhat stochastic distribution of possible future traits that might emerge decades in the future.
In other words, pace Derek Parfit, there might be almost as much genetic and psychological continuity between parent and child as between person X at time Y and person X at time Y + many decades. In neither case does the ‘person-directed’ thinking quite capture the malleable nature of human identity within lives and across generations.