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.