Siding Wang
Peking University
Abstract
A way to frame Parfit’s Nonidentity Problem (NIP) is that people do not seem to have a claim against being brought into existence as long as their lives are worth living. In this paper, I propose a novel account for solving NIP that has its normative source in the misuse of power. I claim that people have an “prima facie” interest in continuing to exist, from which I argue that some worthwhile life would not be worth living if the person did not possess this interest. Based on this interest in continuing to exist, the Vulnerability Account, which can be seen as a revision of Liberto’s “Exploitation Solution,” is put forth. The Vulnerability Account explains the wrongfulness of a range of cases where those whose existences are conditional upon some defectiveness are brought into existence.
I. Introduction
The biological fact from which the Nonidentity Problem arose is that each time we cause someone to exist, we cause a conditional existence. By a conditional existence, I mean an existence that is only possible under certain conditions. For example, my existence derives from a sperm-egg pair combined at a specific time. If I exist, then the necessary conditions of this very combination must have been met. Yet, the satisfaction of these necessary conditions also impact my quality of life. See the following case provided by Boonin (130):
Blind Child: In a pre-conception check-up, Wilma is told by the doctor that if she conceives now, she will conceive a blind child whose life is less than normal but still worth living. If she instead takes a pill daily for the next two months before conceiving, she will conceive a sighted child. Wilma decides that taking pills is too inconvenient and ends up conceiving a blind child, Pebble.
Pebble’s conditional existence can be described as follows: if Pebble exists, then Pebble exists with blindness, which would make her life “less than normal.” By “less than normal,” I take the author to mean those circumstances not prosperous enough given the state of our society. These can include disabilities, harsh upbringing, etc., but it need not be inherently bad. I will keep to this definition for the rest of the paper. Equipped with a comparative account of harm, which says that A’s act harms B only when A’s act makes B worse off than B would otherwise have been (Parfit, “Reasons and Persons”), Wilma’s act does not harm Pebble since Pebble would otherwise not exist, and therefore cannot be worse off had Wilma taken the pills.
Parfit grants people a claim against being brought into an existence that is not “worth living.” “Worth living” indicates a quality of life, and saying that someone’s life is not “worth living” means that it is better for the actual person not to exist. While non-existence and existence are not on a scale to make an impartial comparison on which state is better, it can nevertheless be true that it is better for the actual person that she exists (or does not exist). It is in this sense that causing existence can harm; while most events that benefited a person would make the person worse off had they not occurred, “there is one special event whose non-occurrence would not have been worse for this actual person. This event, unsurprisingly, is the coming-to-be actual of this person” (Parfit 138). The wrongfulness of causing existence not worth living is thus based on harm.
Does a person brought into a life that is worth living but in some ways defective, such as Pebble, also have a claim against her being brought into existence? The most commonly discussed solution appeals to one’s claimed right to avoid being brought to certain conditional existences—here, Wilma’s wrongfulness lies in her violation of Pebble’s right to be born into a certain good condition (i.e., sighted). However, this account has already been challenged by the source of this right, as well as what specific rights people have. If a person does not regret the fact that she has been born, the right to have been born into certain conditions can be seen as waived (Parfit 374). The specific account of rights in existing literature is always based on our understanding of a good life, be it “seriously defective” (Kavka, “Future Individual”) or “not being able to acquire… elements of well-being” (Smolkin, “Rights-Based Solution), which requires further justifications yet.
In this paper, I will propose an alternative account that separates wrongfulness from harm, which grounds wrongfulness of the procreative choices NIP is concerned with not in violating rights but in the misuse of power. In the coming section, I claim that people have an interest in continuing to exist, from which I argue that some worthwhile life would not be worth living had the person not possessed this interest. Then, in the following section, I propose the Vulnerability Account which explains the wrongfulness in causing these existences. In the final section, I explain how this Vulnerability Account can account for cases and respond to some potential objections to my account.
I. Worth Living: With or Without an Interest in Continuing to Exist
The notion of “worth living” is not to be applied to possible persons who have not yet come to exist. In describing people whose lives are not worth living, Parfit explains that “they would all kill themselves if they could” (406). For those who have a life worth living, he says “Since their life is worth living, they don’t regret that they’re being born” (373). For most of us, regretting our coming-to-exist and wishing our ceasing-to-exist are responses to different levels of miserableness because there seems to be a cost to dying when we are already born. But for Parfit, the events of both coming and ceasing to exist happen to the actual person. In the position of the actual person, regretting the former could at least be reasonably equivalent to wishing the latter as a fitting attitude to a life not worth living. Since we are never in a position to imagine what it is like not to exist, it is not unreasonable to claim that we cannot regret it unless our lives are not worth living.
In understanding the concept of worth living, it is crucial to note that the actual person takes an interest in continuing to exist. Once one has been brought into existence, one has a prima facie interest in continuing to exist. It helps to illustrate this interest negatively with the cost to cease to exist. For instance, there is a cost to missing some potential future opportunities: What if I win a lottery tomorrow? one might think. Then there is the fact that one has to destroy a physical human body, which may be a painful or at least difficult process. There is also the fact that one might feel obligations toward other people, and our ceasing to exist may be against the interests of others whose interests we hope to promote.¹
For A to live a life not worth living, it must be the case that it would benefit A if A ceases to exist. This means that, although A takes an interest in continuing to exist, it is still, all things considered, in A’s interest that A does not exist because the miserableness brought by existence outweighs the interest in continued existence itself. The bar below which lives are not worth living should be very low, call it Q₁. I suggest that if A had not taken an interest in the bare activity of continuing to exist, the quality of life that would not be worth living for her would have to be higher, say, Q₂ such that Q₂>Q₁.
Some might say that since it is impossible for one to not have an interest in continuing to exist, the level of Q₂ is meaningless, but I do not claim that it is better for possible beings not to be brought into existence if their quality of life is below Q₂. It suffices to say that there is such a level of quality of life as Q₂ and that it is not entirely beyond our knowledge. What concerns NIP are the lives between Q₂ and Q₁. In the following section, I shall argue that causing these conditional existences is a misuse of power with the idea of vulnerability, and I start with an investigation of the exploitation account from which my proposal is drawn.
III. Wrongfulness in Causing Vulnerability
The exploitation account finds the normative ground of wrongness as a misuse of power. Liberto argues that the act of the agent in many NIP problems satisfies the requirement for exploitation (2014). She identified two conditions for A to exploit B. First, B is in a vulnerable situation such that B has no reasonable alternatives but to transact with A (the vulnerability clause). Sec-ond, A transacts with B to A’s advantage in a way that is unfair to B (the gain clause). She illustrates the idea with the Antidote Case, where Hiker A sells a cheap snakebite antidote to Hiker B for one million dollars, knowing that Hiker B, whom a venomous snake has just bitten, has no choice but to accept the transaction. Here, Hiker A exploits B in the sense that the latter has no reasonable choice but to accept the transaction with A—a state which A takes advantage of.
Liberto suggests that the agent exploits future persons in a wide range of NIP cases with the satisfaction of the above two conditions.² The first is that future persons are “entirely vulnerable to the choices made by those who have lived before them” (77), by which she means that the persons cannot choose whether or not to be born. The second is the “gain clause,” where Liberto stipulates the gain as perceived ex-ante gains (81–83) such that the parents themselves gain the psychological pleasure of conceiving a child whenever they want.
Criticism of this approach tends to emphasize the essential element of a consented transaction in exploitation: For A to exploit B, there must be an exchange between the two (Caney 485). However, this criticism is inert here because whereas Hiker B traded one million dollars for her continuing to exist, Pebble cannot be said to have traded eyesight for existence. Liberto considers the fact that people cannot choose to be born to make NIP cases quickly satisfy the vulnerability clause. However, the essential element in all exploitations is that the victims voluntarily choose to enter a transaction (Hiker B chooses to buy the antidote, sweatshop workers choose to be employed, etc.). The exploitation account must, therefore, explain the wrongfulness of an act that does not directly violate one’s will (consent), with the support of the concepts of vulnerability and gain. What the exploitation account says is that, because of vulnerability, in justifying an act in the context of a discrepancy of power, it is illegitimate to appeal to either the benefit it brings (“Hiker B would be worse if not for Hiker A!”) or the superficial voluntariness of the other party (“But Hiker B agreed!”). However, in characterizing the impossibility of consent (of the “transaction”) itself as a vulnerability, her description of NIP cases fails to fit well with her conditions for exploitation.
Nevertheless, one can pursue this career with an alternative account which explains relevant cases in terms of the misuse of power. Cases categorized into exploitation are wrong³ because they take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities, which refers to a situation that makes the seemingly bad choice better. We often regard a vulnerability as pre-existing—Hiker B is already in a situation where she could die if she did not pay one million dollars for the antidote. However, the vulnerability is not just pre-existing but is preserved and constantly reproduced. It is wrong to take advantage of this pre-existing vulnerability (through transactions). It is also wrong to contribute to the vulnerability. What causes Hiker B’s vulnerability is not just snakebite but also the non-occurrence of other choices. Hiker A is responsible for the latter part of this situation because she did not offer other choices—after all, she could have sold the antidote at a decent price!
I thus formulate the conditions for causing a vulnerability as such:
Vulnerability Account: A causes B to be vulnerable when 1) A caused B to be in a position to choose between X and not-X 2) what makes B in a position to choose between X and not-X also brings B an additional interest in X which becomes necessary in explaining B’s preference for X.
In the Antidote Case, X is buying the antidote for one million dollars. Hiker A causes Hiker B to choose between X and not-X, and the only reason why Hiker B has an interest in spending the million dollars is that she would otherwise die, which is (at least partially) caused by Hiker A. There is no need for a transaction to occur.
IV. The Vulnerability Account on NIP
I believe that the Vulnerability Account suffices to ground Hiker A’s wrongfulness in this case, as well as a wide range of exploitative cases, but my aim is only to propose an alternative account for the misuse of power that does not rely on the notion of a consensual transaction. In this section, I explain the wrongfulness in NIP cases with an analogy to drug addiction:
Drug Addiction: A drug dealer, John, mixes some drugs in Freddie’s drink. As soon as Freddie drank it, he became addicted. John gives him a contact number for another purchase, and they start the transaction. John gives Freddie a two-day’s dose of the drug every Monday; Freddie would finish the dose and crave the drug for the rest of the week before next Monday.
This craving is the drug’s only negative effect and is reversed immediately by another dosage, and if one quits once and for all, one would experience severe withdrawal reactions but ultimately recover completely. Second, suppose that John has a notebook which says who gets what doses of the drug. This notebook is arbitrary, just as the human reproductive system decides which sperm-egg pair should be healthy and which should be born with diseases. On the top are people who get a dose of seven days weekly and are happy every day—like people born into pleasant circumstances; at the bottom are people who suffer for six days but get high one day (or even less). The suffering from craving the drug six days a week is so great that even at the cost of the withdrawal reaction, it is in one’s interest to quit once and for all.
Providing an addictive substance to someone and causing someone to exist have one critical commonality: each generates a new interest in a person. Now, suppose that the only reason for Freddie not to quit the drug is the overwhelming withdrawal effects. Applying the Vulnerability Account to this case, John wrongs Freddie because first, he causes Freddie to be in a situation to choose between keeping doing drugs or stopping doing drugs. Second, by this very act he imposed an additional interest on Freddie to keep doing the drug (as manifested in the latter’s addiction).⁴ Moreover, Freddie’s claim against being brought into a vulnerable situation does not rely on the judgment that he would be doing better without the drug.⁵ In this respect, Freddie’s position is analogous to the experience of being brought to existence in that none is in a position to assume that “I would be better had I not existed.”
Likewise, causing one to exist also puts one in a position to choose between continuing to exist and ceasing to exist. This is not to say the choice is necessarily explicit to everyone at every moment. Nevertheless, that one does not think about taking one’s own life on a daily basis does not mean that one is not in such a position to choose. In fact, this option is often not apparent precisely because most of us have lives so well worth living that we never hesitate to choose to live even without the prima facie interest in continuing to exist. Applying my account to the Blind Child example above, Wilma causes Pebble to be in a situation to choose between continuing to exist or ceasing to exist. If Pebble’s condition is so difficult that, had she not possessed an interest in continuing to exist, it would be better that she ceased to exist, then Wilma has done wrong in causing Pebble to be in a vulnerable situation. The act that brought Pebble to such a choice also imposed her an additional interest in continuing to exist, to which Pebble’s overall interest in continuing to exist must appeal.
One might worry that my proposal can only account for cases where people have lives which are barely worth living. I contend that my only aim is to show that some lives worth living would not be worth living had the person living them not possessed an interest in existence itself. I have argued that people brought into such existences have complaints. While discovering the range from “not worth living” and “not worth living if I had not the prima facie interest in existence itself” is beyond the scope of this paper, I suppose this range might not be as narrow as it might seem, for the prima facie interest may play an unexpectedly large role. I have been illustrating this very interest with the form of first-person suicidal reasoning to demonstrate this interest’s characteristic of being an imposed one, which might have created a misleading impression that people living life in this range are “one step from death.” However, in line with Parfit’s account of life quality, the bar for “not worth living had I not have the prima facie interest in continuing” also marks an objective level and is quite independent of people’s subjective attitude towards their lives. Furthermore, this very interest can manifest itself in positive ways. For example, Pebble might not have been struggling with suicidal thoughts but regards her continuing to exist as fulfilling obligations towards other people. Her quality of life does not have to be close to not-worth-living in this case, but the Vulnerability Account still holds.
Finally, consider an opposite worry that the Vulnerability Account is too broad. Given that one can never foresee one’s offspring’s life trajectories, is not any procreative choice liable to cause vulnerability? Indeed, and that is why any procreative decision should be made with caution. Nevertheless, there arguably exist conditions that are a lot more liable to causing vulnerability. One should always be cautious when one walks on a road because any walking is liable to be hit by a car, and one can never foresee if one will encounter a drunk driver. However, there are clearly circumstances in which one should be especially careful and consider alternative transportation—e.g., if one is walking in a neighbourhood with a high rate of car accidents. Just as the fact that one is liable to be hit by a car simply by choosing to walk does not diminish one’s responsibility in determining the ideal mode of transportation, the concern of overgenerality does not undermine my Vulnerability Account.⁶
V. Conclusion
The nonidentity problem concerns life that is defective in some way, and we want to find how causing such existences can wrong a person. The spirit of my approach is that what makes life worth living cannot be appealed to an imposed interest. If I were Wilma, I would not conceive Pebble because this defect means that her life’s worth living might have to appeal to an imposed interest. Further, what I have in mind is neither beneficence nor rights, but an appropriate use of power. I use “might” because we do not yet have an exact width of that range, but the probability itself suffices to give me a strong reason not to conceive. While I contend that there could be a sense of uneasiness to rest the final solution with an if clause, my approach has the potentiality to be applied to real-life cases with further refinement.
¹ The Akademie–Ausgabe is a standard method of citing Kant’s writings. It refers to the Akademie Editions (the standard German editions) of his writings. The citation follows this format: Ak. “volume number”: “page number.”
² Cases where existing people take advantage of future people, like the Depletion Case, suit best to the exploitation account, but Liberto insists that her approach covers a wide range of cases and offers analysis for individual procreative choices.
³ I use “cases categorized into exploitation” to show that the following paragraph discusses the cases themselves instead of the normative sources of the wrongfulness in exploitation.
⁴ This is just another way to put the “withdrawal effect.”
⁵ It is possible to think that drug addiction has such a transformative impact on people that Freddie is in no position to assume that “I would be better had I not started this.”
⁶ There is, however, a special class of cases which my account can exclude as not having a claim, namely those who came to be miserable due to their own life choices. In such cases, one can still be “better off” nonexistent had she not possessed the prima facie interest, thereby in a vulnerable position. According to the Vulnerability Account, the parent still plays a part in causing such a vulnerability, but the child would have little complaint to her parent as she is the one to blame for what brought her to this vulnerability.
Works Cited
Boonin, David. “How to Solve the Non-Identity Problem.” _Public Affairs Quarterly_, vol. 22, no. 2, 2008, pp. 129–59.
Caney, Simon. “Justice and Future Generations.” _Annual Review of Political Science_, vol. 21, no. 1, 2018, pp. 475–93.
Kavka, Gregory S. “The Paradox of Future Individuals.” _Philosophy & Public Affairs_, 1982, pp. 93–112.
Liberto, Hallie. “The Exploitation Solution to the Non-Identity Problem.” _Philosophical Studies_, vol. 167, 2014, pp. 73–88.
Parfit, Derek. _Reasons and Persons_. Oxford University Press, 1984.
---. “Whether Causing Someone to Exist Can Benefit This Person.” _Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions_, 2016, pp. 135–40.
Smolkin, Doran. “Toward A Rights-Based Solution to the Non-Identity Problem.” _Journal of Social Philosophy_, vol. 30, no.1, 1999, pp. 194–208
