Rights, interests, and possible people

Abstract

Moral obligations toward future and possible persons depend on the distinction between person-affecting and impersonal ethical principles. Future persons, who will exist regardless of current choices, are harmed if an action makes them worse off than they would otherwise have been. Possible persons, by contrast, exist only as a consequence of a particular choice. A strictly person-affecting principle, which defines wrongness only as harm to specific individuals, fails to account for the moral status of choices that result in less-than-ideal lives when the alternative for those individuals is non-existence. If an individual has a life worth living, they are not worse off than they would have been had they never existed; thus, person-affecting frameworks cannot explain why it is wrong to conceive a handicapped child if waiting would have allowed for the birth of a different, healthy child instead. To preserve common moral intuitions in population ethics, ethical frameworks must either recognize that the act of conception can itself harm or benefit a person, or they must adopt an impersonal principle that prioritizes the total quality of life and the reduction of suffering over the specific interests of individuals. – AI-generated abstract.