The Nonidentity Problem And Its Solutions

The nonidentity problem points out that one act may cause someone is born and has a defect at the same time.This poses a challenge to intergenerational ethics,which is hard to make moral judgments about whether the act is detrimental to the future generations if it is precisely their condition of existence.The establishment of the nonidentity problem needs to meet three conditions: the first,genes as the premise of the existence of a specific person;the second,existence is better than non-existence;the third,good or bad actions must be good or bad for a specific person.The claim that rejects the nonidentity problem is that all or part of the above conditions are not valid.Consequentialists advocate measuring acts through objective values and choosing the act which causes the best result,and thereby reject the third condition.Nonconsequentialists claim that those acts may violate rights or cause harm,and thereby reject the second condition.But both theories have their own flaws: the former would face some challenges,such as The Repugnant Conclusion,and the latter would be difficult to define the subject of right and the object of harm.Because of the difficulty in the rejecting claims,the accepting claim is that the above conditions can be defended,and we should focus on dealing with moral dilemmas arising from the nonidentity problems.Among them,Heyd reiterated the unsolvable nature of the nonidentity problem,and Boonin further argues that the moral dilemmas of relevant cases can be resolved by clarifying intuitive misunderstandings.Considering Boonin’s uncapability to solve some extreme cases,the thesis attempts to put forward a kind of care ethics approach to replace Boonin’s plan.This new idea constructs the intergenerational care responsibility based on caring ethics so as to limit the severity of moral dilemmas in different the nonidentity cases.