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The Non Identity Problem And The Ethics Of Future People
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Book Synopsis The Non-identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People by : David Boonin
Download or read book The Non-identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People written by David Boonin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Boonin presents a new account of the non-identity problem: a puzzle about our obligations to people who do not yet exist. Our actions sometimes have an effect not only on the quality of life that people will enjoy in the future, but on which particular people will exist in the future to enjoy it. In cases where this is so, the combination of certain assumptions that most people seem to accept can yield conclusions that most people seem to reject. The non-identity problem has important implications both for ethical theory and for a number of topics in applied ethics, including controversial issues in bioethics, environmental ethics and disability ethics. It has been the subject of a great deal of discussion for nearly four decades, but this is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to its examination. Boonin begins by explaining what the problem is, why the problem matters, and what criteria a solution to the problem must satisfy in order to count as a successful one. He then provides a critical survey of the solutions to the problem that have thus far been proposed in the sizeable literature that the problem has generated and concludes by developing and defending an unorthodox alternative solution, one that differs fundamentally from virtually every other available approach.
Book Synopsis Harming Future Persons by : Melinda A. Roberts
Download or read book Harming Future Persons written by Melinda A. Roberts and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman 1 Purpose of this Collection What are our obligations with respect to persons who have not yet, and may not ever, come into existence? Few of us believe that we can wrong those whom we leave out of existence altogether—that is, merely possible persons. We may think as well that the directive to be “fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” 1 does not hold up to close scrutiny. How can it be wrong to decline to bring ever more people into existence? At the same time, we think we are clearly ob- gated to treat future persons—persons who don’t yet but will exist—in accordance with certain stringent standards. Bringing a person into an existence that is truly awful—not worth having—can be wrong, and so can bringing a person into an existence that is worth having when we had the alternative of bringing that same person into an existence that is substantially better. We may think as well that our obligations with respect to future persons are triggered well before the point at which those persons commence their existence. We think it would be wrong, for example, to choose today to turn the Earth of the future into a miserable place even if the victims of that choice do not yet exist.
Book Synopsis Reasons and Persons by : Derek Parfit
Download or read book Reasons and Persons written by Derek Parfit and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1986-01-23 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.
Download or read book Future People written by Tim Mulgan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-01-05 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own? Tim Mulgan develops a new theory of our obligations to future generations, based on a new rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. He argues that the resulting theory accounts for a wide range of independently plausible intuitions - covering individual morality, intergenerational justice, and international justice. In particular, the moderate consequentialist approach is superior to its two main rivals in this area - person-affecting theories and traditional consequentialism. The former fall foul of Parfit's Non-Identity Problem, while the latter are invariably implausibly demanding. Mulgan also claims that most puzzles in contemporary value theory (such as Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion) are actually puzzles in the theory of right action, and can only be solved if we abandon strict consequentialism for a more moderate alternative. The heart of the book is the first systematic exploration of the rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. Mulgan demostrates that this account is superior to all available alternatives, both consequentialist and non-consequentialist. Once we recognise the intergenerational dimension, moral and political philosophy cannot be considered in isolation. The latter must be founded on the former. Rule consequentialism provides the best foundation for a theory of intergenerational justice. Future People brings together several different contemporary philosophical discussions: obligations to future generations, the morality of individual reproduction, the demands of morality, and international justice. While the focus is on developing a new account, there are also substantial discussions of alternative views, especially contract-based accounts of intergenerational justice and competing forms of consequentialism.
Book Synopsis The Risk of a Lifetime by : Rivka Weinberg
Download or read book The Risk of a Lifetime written by Rivka Weinberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original, comprehensive theory of procreative ethics explains what kind of act procreation is and when we may permissibly engage in it. In order to ascertain when the procreative risk is permissible to impose, Weinberg proposes contractualist principles to fairly attend to the interests prospective parents have in procreating and the interests future people have in a life of human flourishing. The book presents a solution to the non-identity problem as well as dilemmas regarding our liberal principles of autonomy, consent, and equality, which may seem to be in tension with our procreative practices.
Book Synopsis Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (Norton Global Ethics Series) by : John Broome
Download or read book Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (Norton Global Ethics Series) written by John Broome and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-07-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital new moral perspective on the climate change debate. Esteemed philosopher John Broome avoids the familiar ideological stances on climate change policy and examines the issue through an invigorating new lens. As he considers the moral dimensions of climate change, he reasons clearly through what universal standards of goodness and justice require of us, both as citizens and as governments. His conclusions—some as demanding as they are logical—will challenge and enlighten. Eco-conscious readers may be surprised to hear they have a duty to offset all their carbon emissions, while policy makers will grapple with Broome’s analysis of what if anything is owed to future generations. From the science of greenhouse gases to the intricate logic of cap and trade, Broome reveals how the principles that underlie everyday decision making also provide simple and effective ideas for confronting climate change. Climate Matters is an essential contribution to one of the paramount issues of our time.
Download or read book Exploitation written by Alan Wertheimer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-08-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this volume, Professor Wertheimer discusses when a transaction can be properly regarded as exploitative - as opposed to some other moral deficiency - and explores the moral weight of taking unfair advantage.
Book Synopsis Ethics, Society, Politics by : Hajo Greif
Download or read book Ethics, Society, Politics written by Hajo Greif and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A real book on ethics, as Wittgenstein had it, if one could conceive it in the first place, would be the book to destroy all other books. Yet there is an increasing number of real-world discourses in which ethical values are mobilized as justifications for socio-political action while, in turn, moral problems are becoming a topic of political negotiation. Although it will be difficult to find systematic accounts of an absolute good or of absolute values in these debates, it is equally difficult to imagine them not being deeply informed by such considerations. Rather than merely adding to the corpus of applied ethics on the one hand or remaining in seemingly Wittgensteinian silence about ethics on the other, many contributions to this volume explore the reach of what can be said in ethical terms, while others provide critical discussions of what is being said in various fields of applied ethics and political philosophy under real-world power relations. This volume collects invited contributions from the 35th International Wittgenstein Symposium 2012 in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria. Authors include: Alice Crary, Peter Dabrock, Rom Harré, Agnes Heller, Jaakko Hintikka, Peter Koller, Anton Leist, Chantal Mouffe, Julian Nida-Rümelin, Hans Sluga, David Stern, Gianni Vattimo.
Download or read book Dead Wrong written by David Boonin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person is dead. David Boonin defends this view in Dead Wrong and explains the puzzle of posthumous harm. In doing so, he makes three central claims. First, that it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person while they are alive even if the act has no effect on that person's conscious experiences. Second, that if this is so, then frustrating a person's desires is one way to wrongfully harm a person. And third, that it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person even if the act takes place after the person is dead. Over the course of the book, Boonin introduces the significance of posthumous harm, deals with each of his three main claims in turn, responds to the objections that might be raised against the book's thesis, and examines some of the ethical implications for issues such as posthumous organ and gamete removal, posthumous publication of private documents, damage to graves and corpses, and posthumous punishment and restitution.
Book Synopsis Ethics and Existence by : Jeff McMahan
Download or read book Ethics and Existence written by Jeff McMahan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work--in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral theories but also threaten to undermine many important common-sense moral beliefs. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a broad range of practical moral issues that cannot be adequately understood until fundamental problems in population ethics are resolved. These issues include abortion, prenatal injury, preconception and prenatal screening for disability, genetic enhancement and eugenics generally, meat eating, climate change, reparations for historical injustice, the threat of human extinction, and even proportionality in war. Although the essays in this book address foundational problems in population ethics that were discovered and first discussed by Parfit, they are not, for the most part, commentaries on his work but instead build on that work in advancing our understanding of the problems themselves. The contributors include many of the most important and influential writers in this burgeoning area of philosophy.
Book Synopsis A Theory of Intergenerational Justice by : Joerg Chet Tremmel
Download or read book A Theory of Intergenerational Justice written by Joerg Chet Tremmel and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly accessible book provides an extensive and comprehensive overview of current research and theory about why and how we should protect future generations. It exposes how and why the interests of people today and those of future generations are often in conflict and what can be done. It rebuts critical concepts such as Parfits' non-identity paradox and Beckerman's denial of any possibility of intergenerational justice. The core of the book is the lucid application of a veil of ignorance to derive principles of intergenerational justice which show that our duties to posterity are stronger than is often supposed. Tremmel's approach demands that each generation both consider and improve the well-being of future generations. To measure the well-being of future generations Tremmel employs the Human Development Index rather than the metrics of utilitarian subjective happiness. The book thus answers in detailed, concrete terms the two most important questions of every theory of intergenerational justice: what to sustain? and how much to sustain?
Download or read book Beyond Roe written by David Boonin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most arguments for or against abortion focus on one question: is the fetus a person? In this provocative and important book, David Boonin defends the claim that even if the fetus is a person with the same right to life you and I have, abortion should still be legal, and most current restrictions on abortion should be abolished. Beyond Roe points to a key legal precedent: McFall v. Shimp. In 1978, an ailing Robert McFall sued his cousin, David Shimp, asking the court to order Shimp to provide McFall with the bone marrow he needed. The court ruled in Shimp's favor and McFall soon died. Boonin extracts a compelling lesson from the case of McFall v. Shimp--that having a right to life does not give a person the right to use another person's body even if they need to use that person's body to go on living-and he uses this principle to support his claim that abortion should be legal and far less restricted than it currently is, regardless of whether the fetus is a person. By taking the analysis of the right to life that Judith Jarvis Thomson pioneered in a moral context and applying it in a legal context in this novel way, Boonin offers a fresh perspective that is grounded in assumptions that should be accepted by both sides of the abortion debate. Written in a lively, conversational style, and offering a case study of the value of reason in analyzing complex social issues, Beyond Roe will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, and to anyone interested in the debate over whether government should restrict or prohibit abortion.
Book Synopsis The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation by : Trevor Hedberg
Download or read book The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation written by Trevor Hedberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the link between population growth and environmental impact and explores the implications of this connection for the ethics of procreation. In light of climate change, species extinctions, and other looming environmental crises, Trevor Hedberg argues that we have a collective moral duty to halt population growth to prevent environmental harms from escalating. This book assesses a variety of policies that could help us meet this moral duty, confronts the conflict between protecting the welfare of future people and upholding procreative freedom, evaluates the ethical dimensions of individual procreative decisions, and sketches the implications of population growth for issues like abortion and immigration. It is not a book of tidy solutions: Hedberg highlights some scenarios where nothing we can do will enable us to avoid treating some people unjustly. In such scenarios, the overall objective is to determine which of our available options will minimize the injustice that occurs. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental ethics, environmental policy, climate change, sustainability, and population policy.
Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism by : Ben Eggleston
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism written by Ben Eggleston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilitarianism, the approach to ethics based on the maximization of overall well-being, continues to have great traction in moral philosophy and political thought. This Companion offers a systematic exploration of its history, themes, and applications. First, it traces the origins and development of utilitarianism via the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and others. The volume then explores issues in the formulation of utilitarianism, including act versus rule utilitarianism, actual versus expected consequences, and objective versus subjective theories of well-being. Next, utilitarianism is positioned in relation to Kantianism and virtue ethics, and the possibility of conflict between utilitarianism and fairness is considered. Finally, the volume explores the modern relevance of utilitarianism by considering its practical implications for contemporary controversies such as military conflict and global warming. The volume will be an important resource for all those studying moral philosophy, political philosophy, political theory, and history of ideas.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics by : Stephen Mark Gardiner
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics written by Stephen Mark Gardiner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.
Book Synopsis The Ethics of Killing by : Jeff McMahan
Download or read book The Ethics of Killing written by Jeff McMahan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on philosophical notions of personal identity and the immorality of killing, Jeff McMahan looks at various issues, including abortion, infanticide, the killing of animals, assisted suicide, and euthanasia.
Book Synopsis The Imperative of Responsibility by : Hans Jonas
Download or read book The Imperative of Responsibility written by Hans Jonas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.
