In yesterday’s post, I talked about the paradoxical non-identity problem, which leads to the absurd conclusion that some immoral actions, like purposely polluting the planet or attempting to give your child a horrible disease, actually cause little harm. In case you forgot, here is the standard layout of the argument:

An action only harms a person if they would have been better off in some way.

In many reproductive cases, the identity (and existence) of the person depends on the action taken.

If an action determines one’s existence, there would be no scenario where the same person would have been better off.

A life is always worth living.

Conclusion 1: The person who was born, albeit into a world of pain, was not actually harmed.

Conclusion 2 (the paradox): Either we reject (a) our intuition, stating that, for example, polluting the planet or selecting for a child with cystic fibrosis is not wrong, or (b) challenge the standard philosophical definition of harm.

In this post, I’d like to share a critique I have of the argument. As the argument directly challenges our intuition, this can be achieved in quite a few ways other than what I outline below.

Objection 1: Reject premise number 4. The non-identity argument rests on the belief that a life, no matter how painful it is, is better than no life at all. This inequality (shitty life > no life) is what allows philosophers like Parfit to claim that a child with cystic fibrosis was not actually harmed. However, is this really true? I think this premise suffers from a whole lot of bias, namely, we are already human beings, therefore, it is more difficult for us to imagine not living compared to someone who never experienced the joy (or pain) of life to begin with. Say we take a page out of Jeremy Bentham’s book and attempt to classify quality of life on a numerical scale in a quasi-mathematical way.

We should start by assigning a value of 0 to a life of non-existence. Such a life cannot be good, but at the same time, it cannot be bad—it is simply nothing. Additionally, the “owner” of this life does not regret that they never had a chance to enjoy the fruits of life. Ignorance is bliss—as they are unborn, unlike us, they have no clue what joys life holds, and therefore, not being born is not something inherently bad. If we continue on this scale, we might place someone like The Rock or Taylor Swift at the higher end of the scale. This is not to say that these people have had lives without pain or challenges—it is just to say that they have mostly conquered those challenges, and despite setbacks, they are positive, comfortable, and have thoroughly enjoyed the fruits of life. Say we give these people a value of +5.

But then where does a life of debilitating cancer lie? I would posit that it lies somewhere in the negatives, therefore less worth living than a life of non-existence. I’ll repeat this: we only think that our lives are worth living because we have experienced what living is like. If there were someone who had never lived before, they wouldn’t be hurt by saying they can’t live now—they would feel indifference. Such is the case here as well.

The logical counterargument to this is to question why a life with cystic fibrosis lies in the negatives, say, instead of +0.5 or +0.1. This sort of argument often invokes the (sometimes religious) idea of the sanctity of life. I’ll admit that I can’t argue against centuries of faith stating that life in itself is inherently valuable, i.e., I can’t reject the religious side of this argument. What I can do, however, is argue that the idea that life in itself is good is a little bit mistaken. While I agree that life is something valuable, as it is the core essence of our being, that doesn’t mean that life is necessarily “good,” if that makes sense. Just because something should not be taken away does not mean it suddenly attains a positive standing. Think about it this way: life is quite literally like an opportunity, but an opportunity into a world you have zero understanding of, to the point that it matters very little. Let’s say that opportunity has a 50/50 chance of turning out well or not. Now, if someone wanted to take away that opportunity, despite the fact that its outcome is inherently uncertain, you wouldn’t want to give it up. We naturally resist giving up what we already have because of psychological tendencies like loss aversion: once something belongs to us, even if its value is uncertain, we still cling to it.

The mistake, then, is to confuse possession with goodness. Having life does not automatically make life good, just as owning a lottery ticket doesn’t mean it’s a winning ticket. By doing this, we can plausibly agree with the first premise of this argument as well. If we deem it harmful to be brought into a life of severe suffering from a state of nonexistence, i.e., reversing the initial inequality of (shitty life > no life), then we can say that harm was done—even if this requires broadening what we mean by “otherwise.”

Now, defenders of this argument would object to the fact that premise 4 is even a premise of the argument. Parfit himself does this. As the paradox, using the strict philosophical definition of harm, can be generated without the use of the fourth premise, Parfit doesn’t necessarily need it. As you can see, the outcome is still the same: Parfit only needs three premises to generate the paradox:

1. If the action determines existence, there’s no alternative where that same person would have been better off.
2. An action harms a person only if it makes that person worse off than they otherwise would have been.
3. In many reproductive cases, the identity of the person depends on the action taken.

To this, I think Parfit should take a step back and look at his somewhat conflicting ideas of personal identity (which I wrote about earlier on this blog). As a quick refresher, Parfit basically insists that personal identity is not a deep fact, i.e., there is neither a metaphysical soul nor anything else “above the physical” that defines our identity or survival. In a reductionist view, he instead insists that what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness. But this creates tension. If he states that survival and moral concern don’t depend on identity—only on continuity/connectedness—then it seems problematic for him to also rely on identity in setting up the non-identity problem as if it blocks harm claims. In other words, if identity doesn’t matter in the deep way he claims, why should it prevent us from saying Joe was harmed?

My view is that identity does exist, and therefore harm can hinge on identity—as true identity is somewhat metaphysical. But even if I didn’t believe in a metaphysical version of identity, Parfit still cannot comfortably rest his paradox on something that, in his reductionism, he treats as shallow. He should at least accept that if identity, in a reductionist view, truly does arise from psychological continuity, then that continuity must have a starting point. This point is nonexistence, and therefore, something can be harmed—meaning nonexistence can plausibly be better than a life with cystic fibrosis.