Person-affecting views

In population ethics, person-affecting views are views that attempt to capture the intuition that an outcome can be bad only if it is bad for people. (By 'people' it is meant a moral patient rather than a human being.) Derek Parfit distinguishes between narrow person-affecting views, which hold that an outcome can be bad only if it is bad for the people who exist in this outcome, and wide person-affecting views, which allow that an outcome can be bad if some different attainable outcome would have benefited people in it more.

Further reading

Parfit, Derek (1984) Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 393–401.

Thomas, Teruji (2019) The asymmetry, uncertainty, and the long term, Global Priorities Institute, section 2.3.

Related entries

ethics of existential risk | intuition of neutrality | population ethics