Shlomi Segall // To be (Disadvantaged) Or Not to Be? An Egalitarian Guide for Creating New People

CEPS SEMINAR SERIES IN ETHICS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Shlomi Segall (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Abstract:
The late Derek Parfit held that in evaluating the future, we should ignore the difference between necessary persons and merely possible persons. This paper looks at one of the most prominent alternative to Parfit’s view, namely Michael Otsuka and Larry Temkin ‘Shortfall Complaints’ view. On that view we aggregate future persons’ wellbeing and deduct intra-personal shortfall complaints, giving extra weight to the complaints of necessary persons. This paper offers a third view. It rejects Parfit’s No Difference View in that it registers a difference between necessary and possible persons. But it also rejects the Shortfall View and replaces its intra-personal complaint mechanism with inter-personal complaints. It argues that the value of a population is its aggregate prioritarian value minus the egalitarian complaints that necessary persons hold. I offer three objections to the Shortfall view: it is vulnerable to Downward Spiral, Extinction, and Avoiding Improvable Lives. The egalitarian view, in contrast, has all the explanatory power of the Shortfall view, while succumbing to none of the objections that felled it.