Welcome to PHIL 465: Fall 2008
Duties to Future People

Present decisions affect future people: a child has a poor start in life because her teenage parents did not wait to start a family; toxic waste causes health problems in people born years later. Many people think that such carelessness violates our duties to future people. However, Derek Parfit has argued that there is a 'non-identity problem' in such cases and this has proven to be one of the most recalcitrant problems in recent moral philosophy. The problem is that such decisions do not only affect future welfare, they also change who will exist: had the parents waited they would have had a different child; present environmental policy inevitably changes who will meet, marry, and have children. This makes it hard to see the harm in such decisions; the resulting children may face challenges but they would not even have existed otherwise. We will examine the challenge that the non-identity problem presents for moral commonsense and will critically assess attempts to respond to it.

NB: Important resources for this class (including additional required readings and quizzes) are available to registered students via Sakai@UD.