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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Contingent Future Persons: On the Ethics of Deciding Who Will Live, or Not, in the Future

Contingent Future Persons: On the Ethics of Deciding Who Will Live, or Not, in the Future

Fotion, N.
Heller, J. C.

Paperback

Series: Theology and Medicine, Book 9

PhilosophyGeneral ReferenceReligion General

ISBN10: 9401063451
ISBN13: 9789401063456
Publisher: Springer Pg
Published: Oct 12 2012
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
How ought we evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend? In the briefest of terms, this question poses what is addressed here as the problem of contingent future persons, and as such it poses relatively novel challenges for philosophical and theological ethicists. For though it may be counter-intuitive, it seems that those contingent future persons who are actually brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by these actions in any conventional sense of the terms. This intriguing problem was defined almost three decades ago by Jan Narveson [2], and to date its implications have been explored most exhaustively by Derek Parfit [3] and David Heyd [1]. Nevertheless, as yet there is simply no consensus on how we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. Still, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. It is thus proving to be a very fruitful investigation, with far-reaching theoretical and practical implications.

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