Possible Persons and the Problem of Prenatal Harm

Abstract

When attempting to determine which of our acts affect future generations and which affect the identities of those who make up such generations, accounts of personal identity that privilege psychological features and person affecting accounts of morality, whilst highly useful when discussing the rights and wrongs of acts relating to extant persons, seem to come up short. On such approaches it is often held that the intuition that future persons can be harmed by decisions made prior to their existence is mistaken as identity is a most fragile thing with even the smallest differences in the conditions under which we procreate affecting not the interests of distinct future persons, but the identities of those who will come to exist in the future. Within this paper I reject this view, holding that a subscription to these two accounts need not result in the conclusion that virtually all acts relating to possible persons are permitted. Further, I argue that such accounts may in fact allow a great deal more scope for the determination of prenatal harms than accounts of personal identity that privilege physical features. Finally, by interpreting claims regarding causal identity such as Parfit's Time Dependence Claim in terms of Counterpart Theory I suggest that a solution to the non-identity problem can be found in the acceptance of, as relevant in prenatal cases, three kinds of objective similarity relations: Biological, Environmental and Decisional counterpart relations.

Epistemic Possibility and the Necessity of Origin

“…That is to say, a person can have an entirely different set of properties in a possible world and yet be the same person. Meanwhile, Anthony Wrigley (2012) and Nicola Williams (2013) consider a different approach to metaphysical possibility based on David Lewis’s (1968) counterpart theory. This theory analyses the possible ways one might otherwise be in terms of the properties of one’s counterparts in other possible worlds.…”

What is the harm in harmful conception? On threshold harms in non-identity cases

“…She thus suggests that because of this more empirical focus, harm based approaches ‘may be a useful interface between morality and legislation’ [1]. She then observes, however—in recognising the conclusions of the non-identity problem, as have many before her, including ourselves (see, for example, [7, 8])—that this approach seems to offer very few of the benefits it provides in cases of harms to extant persons in the context of reproduction.…”

“…Secondly, it can be viewed as a weak version of Kripke’s origins claim regarding the importance of our material origins for numerical identity on biological accounts of personal identity over time. This interpretation suggests that just as all material things must have their origin in at least some of the matter from which they are constituted, so too must all numerical persons have their origins in, inter alia , the genetic material from which they are constituted in order to be considered the same numerical entity [ 8 ]. Thirdly, however, one might view it as a temporal or environmental claim regarding the importance of possible epigenetic factors and others flowing from the time, place, and manner of our conception.…”

“…Depending on one’s interpretation, it can therefore be noted that non-identity is not simply related to conception and factors tied to the timing of conception, nor, as the Parfit of Reasons and Persons perhaps believed, simply to genetic identity [ 8 , 11 , 12 ]. However, Smajdor’s interpretation of the claim does seem to fall into either the causal or Kripkean camp, as she notes numerous times in her article, the importance for personal identity of our being conceived from the particular egg or sperm from which we were conceived.…”

Ethical aspects of creating human–nonhuman chimeras capable of human gamete production and human pregnancy

“…The second is whether prenatal harm would ensue depending on whether one or the other gestates. For a discussion about possible persons and the problem of prenatal harm see Williams ( 2013 ).…”