Justin Weinberg, University of South Carolina
Sometimes philosophical progress comes from asking unfamiliar questions.
Image by Michał Parzuchowski.
For most people, the question, “Does non-identity matter?” comes off not just as unfamiliar, but incomprehensible. When people think of philosophy, other questions usually come to mind, such as “do we have free will?”, “what is knowledge?”, or “how should I live?”
What happened to these big, classic questions?
Philosophers are still asking them, it’s just that we’ve gotten better at discovering new questions that need to be examined on our way to answering those large, topic-defining problems—and it’s in the articulation and exploration of these new questions that we can see how philosophy makes progress.
So what does it mean to ask “does non-identity matter?” and how does it relate to living a good life?
Bringing up Gauvin: A case study
In 2002, The Washington Post reported on a well-off deaf lesbian couple, Candy and Sharon, who wanted to have a deaf baby. To do so, they sought out donor sperm from a deaf friend and used it to artificially inseminate Sharon. Sharon gave birth to a son, Gauvin, who was born mostly deaf and who was predicted to shortly lose whatever hearing he had.
In my experience, most people who hear about this case consider it to be a clear example of a wrong act. Here, the philosopher asks: why?
The most common answer is that Candy and Sharon have harmed their child—they’ve made Gauvin badly off in some respect, by making him deaf. This answer depends on the assumption, widely held among the hearing, that it is worse to be deaf, other things equal. This assumption is worth investigating, but let’s leave it aside for now and assume, for the sake of argument, it is correct.
Image by @milkovi
Notice, though, that making someone badly off in some respect isn’t the same thing as harming them. If your arm is trapped under an immovable boulder and the only way for me to save your life is to amputate your arm and I do so, I have left you badly off in an important respect—minus one arm—but most people would deny that I’ve harmed you. That’s because we typically understand an action to be harmful if it makes you worse off than you otherwise would have been.
Once we make this observation about harm, though, we may run into trouble with our initial judgment that Candy and Sharon harmed Gauvin. Had they tried to make a hearing child instead, they would have gotten sperm from a different, hearing donor. Given an important fact about the human reproductive system, namely that each of us is the product of a unique meeting of a particular sperm and a particular egg, changing one or both of those changes the identity of the resultant child. If they had chosen a hearing donor, they wouldn’t have wound up with a hearing version of Gauvin. Instead, they would have a different person altogether: a biological half-sibling to the now never-created Gauvin.
In deciding to make a deaf child, Candy and Sharon did make a child who is, on our assumptions, badly off in some respect—he’s deaf. But they did not make him worse off than he otherwise would have been, since had they acted differently he wouldn’t have existed. And so they did not harm him.
Framing the philosophical debate
This is the non-identity problem: how do we explain the wrongness of an act that leaves a person in some respect badly off but is also responsible for that same person’s worthwhile existence? It gets its name from the fact that in some cases in which we think we’re comparing different outcomes for the same person, we are actually comparing outcomes for different (non-identical) persons.
Some philosophers think non-identity should make a difference to our moral judgments about actions like those of Candy and Sharon. We might have thought they acted wrongly, but, they say, we should revise our judgment in light of the realization that Candy and Sharon haven’t harmed anyone.
Other philosophers think non-identity should not make a difference to our moral judgments. They say we should still think that actions like those of Candy and Sharon are wrong. If this is the case, then we need a convincing account of what makes an act wrong even if it doesn’t harm anyone—or we need a convincing new account of harm that explains how, for example, Candy and Sharon actually did harm Gauvin by choosing to conceive a deaf child.
Mapping moral uncertainty
So how does this debate connect to more classic questions about living a good life? After all, most of us will never find ourselves in the position of using reproductive technology to create deaf children.
Well, it turns out that many of our decisions will have effects on not just the welfare but the identity of future persons. If we are not harming future people but are instead causing a set of people to come into existence who are not as well off as another set of people who we could have caused to come into existence, is there anything wrong with that? Or perhaps we will be moved by these kinds of examples to devise new definitions of “harm” or “wrong”, which have been central concepts in moral philosophy for millennia.
The non-identity problem, less than 50 years old, is relatively young by philosophical standards. But the interesting new questions it raises about right, wrong, and harm could have implications for how to act in all sorts of situations. These are issues we will need to address if we are going to satisfactorily explore the bigger philosophical question of how to live.
Justin Weinberg
is associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. He writes on questions in moral and political philosophy, and is currently at work on a project on disagreement. He also runs Daily Nous, a news and discussion site for academic philosophers.