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Persons in Prospect

October 2015

DOI:10.11647/OBP.0061.06

Authors:

J. David Velleman

Johns Hopkins University

The ethics of treating future persons.

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Persons in ProspectJ. DAVID VELLEMAN

i. the identity problem

Derek Parﬁt calls it the non-identity problem.

It’s the problem of how to

treat future persons given that any attempt to treat them better may

result instead in their never being born. For example, the people who will

have inadequate resources in the twenty-second century because of our

wastefulness today will owe their existence to human couplings that

never would have occurred if we had lowered our thermostats and show-

ered less often. As those future people commute by bicycle or read by

candlelight, they will have to acknowledge that we couldn’t have con-

served resources for them, since our conserving would have prevented

them from existing. Because the people affected by our wastefulness will

not be identical to those who would have been affected by our conser-

vation, there appear to be no future individuals for us to harm or beneﬁt,

whatever we do.

This description of the problem depends on an empirical assumption

about the effects of our environmental policies on the makeup of the

These three essays were written in conjunction with an undergraduate course on the

topic “Future Persons,” which I taught at NYU in the fall of . My thanks to the students

enrolled in the course for helping me to think through the issues. The entire series has been

much improved by close reading and detailed commentary from Imogen Dickie, Jeff Sebo,

and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs.

. Parﬁt ﬁrst discussed the problem in “On Doing the Best for Our Children,” in Ethics

and Population, ed. Michael Bayles (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, ), pp. –. See

also Robert Merrihew Adams, “Existence, Self-Interest, and the Problem of Evil,” Nous 

(): –; Gregory Kavka, “The Paradox of Future Individuals,” Philosophy & Public

Affairs  (): –; Thomas Schwartz, “Obligations to Posterity,” in Obligations to

Future Generations, ed. Richard Sikora and Brain Barry (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, ), pp. –. I will deal primarily with Parﬁt’s discussion of the problem in Part IV

of Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

population. In this part I will argue that even if this empirical assumption

were false, the problem would remain. Even if we could ensure that

the people affected by our conservation were identical to the people

affected by our wastefulness, neither group could be harmed or ben-

eﬁted by what we do. I call it the identity problem, to indicate that it is a

variant of Parﬁt’s.

In subsequent parts I will develop a solution to the problem in both of

its forms. In Part II (“The Gift of Life”), I will articulate a conception of

what we do to someone by bringing him into existence, and how we

thereby incur personal obligations to him.

The resources developed in

Part II will enable me to address the (non-)identity problem directly in

Part III (“Love and Nonexistence”).

A fault-line runs between Parﬁt’s discussion of personal identity in

Part III of Reasons and Persons and his subsequent discussion of the

non-identity problem in Part IV. The discussion in Part III is largely

devoted to the question what matters in survival: what it is about our

relation to past and future selves that grounds our self-interested

concern for them, including our concern for the latter’s very existence.

The discussion in Part IV is devoted to the obligations that every gen-

eration owes to its successors, the obligations that appear to be under-

mined by the non-identity problem. As Parﬁt points out, this problem

does not involve personal identity over time; it involves “personal

identity in different possible histories of the world.”

The discussions

in Parts III and IV therefore end up relying on different conceptions

of personal identity.

This discontinuity creates a puzzle, because transworld personal

identity bears on obligations between generations by way of the same

self-interested concern that was at issue in Parﬁt’s discussion of iden-

tity through time. The reason why future generations will be in no posi-

tion to blame us for consuming the earth’s resources, according to

Parﬁt, is that they will not be the same as the people who would have

beneﬁted from those resources, had we conserved. The puzzle is

whether a lack of identity with those possible beneﬁciaries will restrict

future people from having any reactions to which they would have

. I use ‘he’ as the unmarked pronoun, which is semantically gender-neutral.

. Reasons and Persons, p. .

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

been entitled otherwise. Even if they could have received the beneﬁts

of our conservation themselves, their complaint for not actually receiv-

ing them will have to rest on damage to their interests, and will thus

presuppose an identiﬁcation of interests between their actual selves

and the merely possible counterparts who would have beneﬁted. If

their relation to those more fortunate counterparts doesn’t include the

basis for self-concern, they will still have no grounds for feeling that

their own interests have suffered. And then it will turn out to make no

difference whether they could have received the beneﬁts, given that

they couldn’t have identiﬁed with the interests of the potential beneﬁ-

ciaries in any case.

(This puzzle is initially difﬁcult to grasp, because it involves a double

counterfactual about what future generations could have felt if they

could have beneﬁted, if we had conserved resources. I hope that the

puzzle will become clearer as I proceed.)

Parﬁt never questions the grounds of ﬁrst-personal concern for other

possible selves. As it turns out, his account of such grounds in the case of

past and future selves cannot be extended to cover the counterfactual

case. And without knowing how self-interest might extend to other

possible selves, we cannot understand why it should matter to future

persons whether they could have been the beneﬁciaries of more respon-

sible behavior on our part.

I am going to analyze Parﬁt’s view of what matters in survival and

then propose a crucial revision of the view. After defending the revised

view, I will point out that the relation mediating our ﬁrst-personal

concern for past and future selves is absent in the case of other

possible so-called selves—not just absent, in fact, but metaphysically

impossible. I will therefore argue that none of the people who would

have existed, if the past history of the world had been different,

merit ﬁrst-personal concern from us. This result has various implica-

tions for the rationality of regret as well as for the problem of

obligations between generations.

According to Parﬁt, what matters in survival is a relation of

psychological connectedness and continuity between present

and future selves. Parﬁt’s deﬁnition of psychological connectedness

begins with Locke’s memory-theory of personal identity: “Let us

say that, between X today and Y twenty years ago, there are direct

 Persons in Prospect

memory connections if X can now remember having some of the expe-

riences that Y had twenty years ago.”

Parﬁt then expands on Locke’s

theory like this:

We should . . . revise the view so that it appeals to other facts. Besides

direct memories, there are several other kinds of direct psychological

connection. One such connection is that which holds between an

intention and the later act in which this intention is carried out. Other

such direct connections are those which hold when a belief or a

desire, or any other psychological feature, continues to be had.

Parﬁt deﬁnes psychological continuity as the ancestral of connected-

ness. That is, X’s being psychologically continuous with Y consists

in there being some (possibly empty) series of subjects S,S,...such

that X is directly connected to S, who is directly connected to

S, . . . who is directly connected to Y. Parﬁt describes this relation

between X and Y as consisting in “chains of psychological connected-

ness,” which may overlap.

Initially, Parﬁt says that what matters in survival is a relation labeled

R, which is a combination of psychological connectedness and continu-

ity. Parﬁt subsequently qualiﬁes his view, by claiming that some psycho-

logical connections are more important than others. The more

important connections, he claims, are the ones that involve features

that are distinctive of the individual, or features that the individual

values in himself.

I suspect that Parﬁt introduces these qualiﬁcations partly because he

equivocates on the phrase “what matters in survival.”

Sometimes Parﬁt

. Reasons and Persons, p. . Parﬁt modiﬁes this deﬁnition by adopting Shoemaker’s

concept of “Q memory” to cancel the possible implication that X’s remembering Y’s expe-

riences entails X’s being the same person as Y (pp. –). I will assume that “memory”

means “Q memory.”

. For the importance of a feature’s distinctiveness, see pp. – and n.  on p. .

For the importance of a feature’s value to the subject, see p. . See also the discussion of

“The Nineteenth Century Russian” on pp. –.

. This point was made by Paul Torek in an unpublished paper and in his Ph.D. dis-

sertation, Something to Look Forward To: Personal Identity, Prudence, and Ethics, Univer-

sity of Michigan, . For the idea that “what matters in survival” is ambiguous in Parﬁt’s

usage, see also Tamar Szabó Gendler, “Personal Identity and Thought Experiments,” Philo-

sophical Quarterly  (): –.

I also suspect that Parﬁt equivocates on the term ‘continuity’. In some contexts, he

uses ‘continuity’ for the ancestral of connectedness. But because he emphasizes the

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

interprets the question “What matters in survival?” to mean “Why should

one have a ﬁrst-personal interest in surviving?”

Sometimes he takes the

question to mean “Why should one have any ﬁrst-personal concern for

the self who will survive?”

These two questions exhaust Parﬁt’s osten-

sible topic, but he obscures this topic with other readings of the question

“What matters in survival?” Sometimes he takes the question to mean

“What is it about one’s present self whose survival in future selves is

worth wanting?”

Sometimes he even takes it to mean “What kind of

survival is worth wanting?”

The latter readings of the question are not equivalent to the former.

One’s grounds for taking a self-regarding interest in future persons may

not depend on their having features of oneself that one has an interest in

preserving, or their living lives that one has an interest in living. Conﬂa-

tion of these issues crucially affects Parﬁt’s discussion of problem cases,

in particular, the one that he calls the “Branch Line case.”

In the Branch Line case, Parﬁt imagines a “scanner” that, at the press

of a green button, destroys and analyzes his entire body, including his

brain. The scanner is linked to a “replicator” that assembles a molecule-

by-molecule copy of him on Mars. He then imagines that the scanner is

upgraded to a model that leaves his original body intact, so that there are

duplicate versions of him, one on each planet. Finally, he imagines that

the upgraded scanner has damaged his heart and that he will conse-

quently die within a few days. Having received this dire prognosis, he

speaks with his replica on Mars by interplanetary videophone:

. . . Since my Replica knows that I am about to die, he tries to console

me with the same thoughts with which I tried to console a dying

friend. It is sad to learn, on the receiving end, how unconsoling these

thoughts are. My Replica then assures me that he will take up my life

where I leave off. He loves my wife, and together they will care for my

connections that consist in the mere persistence of a trait or an attitude, he sometimes

understands ‘continuity’ to mean “qualitative continuity,” in the sense that denotes the

absence of abrupt qualitative changes. See, e.g., p.  of Reasons and Persons.

. See, e.g., p. .

. See, e.g., pp. –.

. See, e.g., pp. , , .

. See p. .

. This case is ﬁrst introduced on pp. –. It is discussed again on pp. –.

. P. .

 Persons in Prospect

children. And he will ﬁnish the book that I am writing. Besides having

all of my drafts, he has all of my intentions. I must admit that he can

ﬁnish my book as well as I could....

...

If we believe that my Replica is not me, it is natural to assume that

my prospect, on the Branch Line, is almost as bad as ordinary death.

I shall deny this assumption. As I shall argue later, being destroyed

and Replicated is about as good as ordinary survival.

Parﬁt later explains his view of the case as follows:

It may be slightly inconvenient that my Replica will be psychologically

continuous, not with me as I am now, but with me as I was this

morning when I pressed the green button. But these relations are

substantially the same. It makes little difference that my life brieﬂy

overlaps with that of my Replica.

If the overlap was large, this would make a difference. Suppose that

I am an old man, who is about to die. I shall be outlived by someone

who was once a Replica of me. When this person started to exist forty

years ago, he was psychologically continuous with me as I was then.

He has since lived his own life for forty years. I agree that my relation

to this Replica, though better than ordinary death, is not nearly as

good as ordinary survival. But this relation would be about as good if

my Replica would be psychologically continuous with me as I was ten

days or ten minutes ago.

Parﬁt does not explain why the survival of a forty-year-old replica would

be less desirable than that of a replica produced within the past ten

minutes. He seems to imply that the survival of the forty-year-old replica

would be less desirable because he has “lived his own life for forty years”

and would be less likely to carry on the life that will be cut short at Parﬁt’s

death. At the replica’s creation forty years ago, he might have ﬁnished

the book that Parﬁt was writing then, but he now lacks the beliefs,

desires, and intentions that would enable him to ﬁnish the book that

Parﬁt is writing now and will not survive to ﬁnish. Parﬁt’s judgment in

this case thus illustrates his view that what matters in survival is the

continuation of that in oneself or one’s life which one ﬁnds important.

. P. .

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

Parﬁt concludes his discussion of the Branch Line case with the

admission that his judgment is counterintuitive:

...Iadmit that this is one of the cases where my view is hardest to

believe. Before I press the green button, I can more easily believe that

my relation to my Replica contains what fundamentally matters in

ordinary survival. I can look forward down the Main Line where there

are forty years of life ahead. After I have pressed the green button, and

have talked to my Replica, I cannot in the same way look forward

down the Main Line. My concern for the future needs to be redirected.

I must try to direct this concern backwards up the Branch Line beyond

the point of division, and then forward down the Main Line. This

psychological manoeuvre would be difﬁcult. But this is not surprising.

And, since it is not surprising, this difﬁculty does not provide a sufﬁ-

cient argument against what I have claimed about this case.

Reading this passage, one wonders why a difﬁculty should have to be

surprising in order to be philosophically signiﬁcant. One rather suspects

that Parﬁt’s talk of “redirecting” his concern up one “line” and down the

other—talk of a kind that appears nowhere else in Parﬁt’s discussion—

reveals an important feature of self-concern, a feature that will help to

explain the rationality both of wanting to have future selves and of caring

about their fate.

In what sense does Parﬁt ﬁnd himself directing his concern “up” one line

and “down” the other in the Branch Line case? The answer is that “up”

and “down” in this case represent the direction of time. Parﬁt later says

that psychological continuity is a transitive relation in either temporal

direction but not “if we allow it to take both directions in a single

argument.”

That is, the reason why Parﬁt is not psychologically

continuous with any of his replicas is that the psychological connections

between them run ﬁrst backwards in time, up to the point of division,

and then forwards, down the “main line.” But why should this change of

temporal direction make any difference? Parﬁt doesn’t say. He simply

admits that when directing his self-concern through time, he has

difﬁculty switching directions.

. Ibid.

. P. .

 Persons in Prospect

I suggest that concern for his “main line” replica is difﬁcult for Parﬁt

because the direction of time is also the direction of causation, and the

change of direction severs internal communication between Parﬁt and

his replica, in the sense that their psychological connections cannot

carry information between them. Parﬁt’s conception of psychological

connections has all along implied that they are channels of information,

but he has chosen instead to emphasize the relations of resemblance

between their input and output—between experiences and the

corresponding memories, intentions and the corresponding actions,

psychological features and their subsequent instantiation—rather than

the fact that these inputs and outputs are connected in ways that convey

information.

Yet Parﬁt’s difﬁculty in feeling concern for his replica

seems to indicate that internal communication with earlier or later

selves is signiﬁcant.

I now turn to an explanation of why such communication is

signiﬁcant. After that, I will return to the puzzle of obligations

between generations.

Last night I dreamed that I was Wittgenstein brandishing a poker at Karl

Popper. (I am prone to nightmares.)

. See pp. –, where Parﬁt discusses the case in which psychological continuity

and connectedness have a cause that isn’t reliable. Parﬁt says that a replica to whom one is

unreliably connected is just as good as one to whom one’s connection is reliable. He

compares this case to that of a medication that effects a cure sometimes but not reliably:

“This effect is just as good, even though its cause was unreliable.” This analogy suggests

that what matters in survival are the effects of one’s causal connections to future selves, not

the connections themselves.

. This and the next several sections draw on material from my “Self to Self,” Philo-

sophical Review  (): –; reprinted in Self to Self : Selected Essays (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. That paper draws in turn on Bernard

Williams’s “The Imagination and the Self,” in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, ), pp. –. Parﬁt makes a similar point on p. :

Since Jane seems to remember seeing the lightning, she seems to remember herself

seeing the lightning. Her apparent memory may tell her accurately what Paul’s experi-

ence was like, but it tells her, falsely, that it was she who had this experience.

There may be a sense in which this claim is true. Jane’s apparent memories may come

to her in what Peacocke calls the ﬁrst-person mode of presentation. Thus, when she

seems to remember walking across the Piazza, she might seem to remember seeing a

child running towards her. If this is what she seems to remember, she must be seeming

to remember herself seeing this child running towards her.

We might deny these claims. In a dream, I can seem to see myself from a point of view

outside my own body. I might seem to see myself running towards that point of view.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

Now, when I say, “I dreamed that I was Wittgenstein,” my ﬁrst use of

‘I’, in “I dreamed,” refers to me, David Velleman, who groaned in his

sleep and then woke up remembering a nightmare. What about my

second use of ‘I’, the one in “I was Wittgenstein”? That use of ‘I’ occurs

within a that-clause reporting the content of my dream, and so it refers,

in the ﬁrst instance, to a component of the content being reported—

speciﬁcally, the ﬁrst-personal component. The dream is thus reported to

have represented someone ﬁrst-personally. But who?

I did not dream that David Velleman was Wittgenstein. While dream-

ing, I was temporarily oblivious to the existence of David Velleman—

oblivious, in fact, to my own actual existence under any name or

description whatsoever. But my dream contained a ﬁrst-personal mode

of presentation, since it represented an experience from the perspective

of its subject—an experience of brandishing a poker, from the perspec-

tive of the poker-brandishing experient. Who was he?

The dreamed-of experience, though similar to one that Wittgenstein

might have had, was merely dreamed of, not real. There was no poker, no

Popper, and no experience of brandishing the one at the other—only a

dream of such an experience. Hence there was no subject of the

dreamed-of experience, either: there was only a dreamed-of subject. In

my dream-report, then, the second ‘I’ refers to a ﬁrst-personal mode of

presentation that, in its original occurrence, failed to pick out a referent

at all. My dream had the content “I am Wittgenstein . . . ,” but there was

no one of whom I was dreaming that he was Wittgenstein.

Here is another nightmarish scene. I am six years old and my grandfather

is holding me up to look over the parapet of the observation deck on the

Empire State Building. I am terriﬁed of falling. (I wet my pants.)

Since it is myself that I seem to see running in this direction, this direction cannot be

towards myself. I might say that I seem to see myself running towards the seer’s point of

view. And this could be said to be the direction in which Jane seems to remember seeing

this child run. So described, Jane’s apparent memory would include no references to

herself.

Though we could deny that Jane’s apparent memories must seem, in part, to be about

herself, there is no need to do so. Even if her apparent memories are presented in the

ﬁrst-person mode, Jane need not assume that, if they are not delusions, they must be

memories of her own experiences....

. For this analysis of ﬁrst-person reference in dreams, I am indebted to Imogen

Dickie.

 Persons in Prospect

This report and the last are similar in giving the content of a second-

order experience: a dream of an experience in the ﬁrst report, a

memory of an experience in the second. I can bring out this similarity

by saying, “I had a dream about an experience in which I was Wittgen-

stein brandishing a poker,” and “I have the memory of an experience in

which I am a six-year-old visiting the Empire State Building.” And now

we can ask about my second report the same question that we asked

about the ﬁrst. I have the memory of an experience in which someone

is a six-year-old visiting the Empire State Building. But who? Who

is that six-year-old, according to the content of the remembered

experience?

Conveniently for present purposes, that six-year-old was called Jamie,

and so I can distinguish him from the ﬁfty-ﬁve-year-old who remembers

his visit to the Empire State Building. I can say, “I, David, have the

memory of an experience in which I am Jamie visiting the Empire State

Building.” Obviously, I cannot be reporting the memory of an experience

in which it is I, David, who am Jamie. The experience occurred in ,

and in the content of the experience, its subject was the six-year-

old Jamie. Fifty-ﬁve-year-old David was still forty-nine years in the

future—an impossibly old man who Jamie could not imagine becoming.

And the experience that occurred in  at the top of the Empire State

Building was not an experience as of a ﬁfty-ﬁve-year-old stranger

inhabiting a six-year-old’s body. (I would have done something even

worse in my pants.)

Although David wasn’t represented as being six-year-old Jamie in the

remembered experience, perhaps he is so represented in my memory of

the experience. Maybe the memory has a memorial mode of presenta-

tion, by which it presents a visit to the Empire State Building as formerly

experienced by me.

I think that there is a distinctively memorial mode of presentation, but

I do not think that it is ﬁrst-personal with respect to the remembering

subject, in addition to the subject of the remembered experience. Rather,

a memory presents earlier events as experienced and recorded herein.

When I remember visiting the Empire State Building, I have an image of

that visit as it appeared at the initial receipt of this very image.

Questions about the memorial mode of presentation must be distin-

guished from questions about the concept of memory. Some philoso-

phers think that classifying a mental image as a memory implies not only

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

that it represents an experience that actually occurred, but also that it

represents an experience that occurred to the present subject of the

image. If these conditions are not met, according to these philosophers,

then the image must be reclassiﬁed as a merely apparent memory. But

what appears in a memory, real or apparent, is that the experience

occurred and was herein recorded, not that it occurred to the remem-

bering subject. A memory appears to be a record of the experience; it

does not necessarily appear to be a memory—not, at least, if the concept

of memory includes an identity between the remembering and remem-

bered subjects. If that identity is thought of at all, the thought of it is

a further inference.

I can express this inference by saying, “I must have visited the Empire

State Building as a child, because I remember visiting it.” The second

clause of my statement can be expanded to “...Iremember that I visited

it,” but the second ‘I’ in the clause still refers to the ﬁrst-personal mode

of presentation by which the memory-image presents the experience as

recorded from the perspective of the experient. In other words,

“I remember that I visited it” says no more than “I remember visiting it”:

it says that I have an experiential record of a visit from the visitor’s point

of view.

In this respect, my memory report resembles my dream report.

The

crucial difference is that, whereas the ﬁrst-personal mode of presenta-

tion in my dream failed to pick out a subject, the corresponding mode of

presentation in my memory succeeds in picking out the subject of the

remembered experience, the six-year-old Jamie. The memory-image

inherits the references of that experience, thus providing me with a

context in which I can, by directing my attention, make particular

objects perceptually salient, so that I can refer in thought to “this [pic-

tured] building,” “that [pictured] parapet,” and so on. It also inherits the

reference of the ﬁrst person, providing a context in which I can think of

Jamie as “this person [not pictured],” or “me.”

When I say that the memory-image provides a context for referring to

Jamie as “me,” I do not mean that it establishes my numerical identity

with him. My ability to pick him out with the ﬁrst-person pronoun has

. I am overlooking the fact that the dream report is mediated by a memory of the

dream, whereas the memory report is not mediated by a memory of the memory. That

difference is irrelevant for present purposes.

 Persons in Prospect

nothing to do with whether he was the same person as my present,

remembering self. I can pick him out in the ﬁrst person because he was

the subject of the experience from which my memory-image inherits its

references. The image has an egocentric point of view, which was the

point of view of the original experience, in which Jamie was the ego at its

center. In entertaining the image, then, I am thinking of Jamie as “me.”

When I infer from the memory that I must have visited the Empire State

Building as a child, I take a step beyond the content of a ﬁrst-personal

record of the experience. What do I infer?

In moments of philosophical alertness, I infer that I, David, am a

segment of a temporally extended entity of which Jamie was a much

earlier segment—or something of that sort. For when David and Jamie

are considered as a ﬁfty-ﬁve-year-old and a six-year-old, respectively, as

I have been considering them, they are by no means identical; they are

merely uniﬁed across time, by intervening person-stages (one of whom

changed his name).

Ordinarily, however, no thought of their being uniﬁed in this manner

ever crosses my mind. What does cross my mind, I think, is that I am

literally identical to Jamie, because both of us are “me”—not just

dreamed or imagined to be “me” but accurately experienced (David) and

remembered (Jamie) as “me,” and consequently one and the same.

Before I consider any sameness of person between Jamie and me, I ﬁnd

myself able to pick him out in memory as “me,” and for that very reason

I infer us to be the same person, and not just different stages of the same

person but numerically identical.

This inference involves an error that is easy to explain.

I have occur-

rent experiences in which there is a ﬁrst-personal mode of presentation

that picks out the subject, who is David; I also have a memory-image in

which the ﬁrst-personal mode of presentation picks out the subject of

the experience from which it was recorded, who was Jamie. When I have

. Richard Wollheim would call Jamie the “internal subject” of the image. See Lecture

III of Painting as an Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ); see also Woll-

heim’s “Imagination and Identiﬁcation,” in On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, ), pp. –.

. I discuss this error in “So It Goes,” The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy  (): –,

〈http://www.amherstlecture.org〉. It is also discussed in Thomas Hofweber and J. David

Velleman, “How to Endure” (unpublished manuscript).

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

multiple images such as these, I have to correlate their frames of refer-

ence so as to ﬁgure out what (in one image) is what (in the other), and

who is who. That’s what I do when turning a map around so as to line it

up with the coordinates of my perceived environment. “That’s Fifth

Avenue,” I say (pointing to a line on the map), “and we’re at Washington

Square Arch” (pointing above my head), “so Broadway must be this way”

(pointing to my right). Similarly, I think, That’s me (Jamie experiencing

the remembered scene) and this is me (David remembering it), so they

must be one and the same.

The relata of this identity relation are momentary subjects, each exist-

ing only for the duration of an experience. In thinking of them as strictly

identical, rather than as distinct segments of a temporally extended

entity, I think of myself as persisting in the manner that metaphysicians

call endurance. (The segment-wise manner of persisting is called perdu-

rance.) That is, I think of myself as an entity of a kind that is wholly present

in each moment of its existence rather than spread out over time in the

form of distinct stages or temporal segments. I think of myself as here in

my entirety now, here all over again now, and so on, a successively

re-existent whole rather than interconnected parts. Thinking of myself as

enduring in this sense is a mistake, but the mistake is understandable.

Consider now experiential anticipation, which is the mirror image of

experiential memory. Suppose that I plan to revisit the Empire State

Building next weekend, and I picture how the city will look from the

observation deck. I compose a mental image of a future experience in

which I am looking out over the parapet.

This kind of experiential anticipation has a complex structure. Unlike

the past self who couldn’t imagine becoming a ﬁfty-ﬁve-year-old

remembering his experience, I know that the subject of next weekend’s

experience will remember having imagined it here and now. In fact, I

now imagine him not only viewing the cityscape but doing so in the

awareness of its being the view that he remembers having hereby imag-

ined. I compose a prospective image of an experience within which this

very image will be accessible in retrospect. It’s as if I were composing a

picture with the intention of climbing through it into the depicted scene

and walking off with an awareness of the picture at my back.

This structure is essential to the rhythm of our mental lives. The air of

expectancy in experiential anticipation comes from its representing a

 Persons in Prospect

future experience as its felt completion—as destined to provide a sense

of closure, that is, to this very expectation, like the notes that are

expected to be heard as the cadence of a currently developing musical

phrase, the exhalation that is expected to resolve an expectant holding of

the breath. The future experience will provide this sense of closure, of

course, only if it includes a retrospective awareness of the current phrase

that it completes, and indeed of that phrase as having been hereby

experienced expectantly, in anticipation of that very closure. So in order

to represent the future experience as its felt completion, the expectation

must represent that experience as including a memory of having

been hereby expected.

Does my expectation represent the future subject of the expected

experience as identical to its own, present subject? Not explicitly. But the

two subjects naturally become conﬂated, as they did in experiential

memory. As in that case, the ‘I’ of the image in which I am viewing the

city next weekend and the ‘I’ of my present context seem to be strictly

identical—a single subject expecting to climb through his own mental

image into the future—rather than distinct segments along the temporal

extent of a perduring entity.

To whom does ‘I’ refer in the context of this image? Is this image like

a memory, in which the ﬁrst-personal mode of presentation picks out

the remote subject of the originating experience? Or is it like a dream,

in which there is a ﬁrst-personal mode of presentation that fails to

determine a reference?

Surely, the subject of this image is my future self visiting the Empire

State Building. But the anticipatory image cannot refer to him in the

same way as the memory-image refers to my past self at the same loca-

tion forty-nine years ago. The memory-image inherits its reference from

the remembered experience, via a channel of information connecting it

to that experience and, through it, to the referent. The anticipatory

image cannot inherit its reference from the future.

But as we have seen, the latter image has an anticipatory mode of

presentation that implies a causal connection to the experience antici-

pated, just as the former has a memorial mode of presentation implying

. The phenomena described here are the ones to which Husserl applied the terms

‘retention’ and ‘protention’. Of course, these prospective and retrospective awarenesses

need not be available to articulate thought.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

a connection to the experience remembered. Whereas the memory-

image represents an event as experienced and recorded in this image, the

anticipatory image represents an event as to be experienced in the light of

this image. Both modes of presentation are implicitly token-reﬂexive, in

that they represent an event in its relation to the images themselves. In

that sense, both images present themselves in their relation to experi-

ences of the events represented: the one presents itself as conveying an

impression from a corresponding experience; the other presents itself as

due to make an impression on a corresponding experience.

Although the latter image cannot inherit its references from the expe-

rience on which it promises to make an impression, it can rely on that

experience to determine its references. The subject of that experience is

expected to remember having hereby anticipated it and to draw the

connections between things represented in the remembered anticipa-

tion and things that he experiences. He will associate the view that he

remembers envisioning with the view spread before him, and his doing

so is already part of what is envisioned. The image therefore represents

things as they will be associated with this very representation by a future

subject who will thereby secure its references to those things.

In some cases, my anticipatory image needn’t rely on a future subject

to determine its references. It already represents the Empire State Build-

ing, whether or not anyone who remembers the image ever draws a

connection between its representation of a building and that building in

particular. But the image also represents an event, for example, and the

question is initially open whether there is a particular, concrete event

that I am imagining; I may simply be imagining that there will be some

event or other of the imagined kind. When my future self connects this

remembered anticipation with a particular event, however, he can say

that I anticipated, not just some such event, but that very one. If I expect

to run across you at the Empire State Building and I do run across you,

then I can say, “This is just as I envisioned it” or “This is not as I envi-

sioned it,” “it” being the particular meeting with which I compared my

vision, as I had already envisioned doing. If I don’t run across you, then

there will have been no particular meeting that I envisioned.

What if I am going to run across you but also forget having envi-

sioned doing so? Well, I won’t then wonder whether our meeting is the

. Here again I am indebted to Imogen Dickie.

 Persons in Prospect

one that I previously envisioned, since I will have forgotten having envi-

sioned it. But from my present perspective of envisioning our meeting,

will a meeting not then associated with its having been hereby envi-

sioned count as the meeting that I now have in mind? From my present

perspective, there seems to be no fact of the matter. If I am imagining an

encounter on the observation deck at noon but I end up running across

you earlier in the subway, will that be the meeting that I am imagining?

The answer would be yes if I am going to remember this imagining and

think, This is not as I imagined it, thereby completing the referential

chain. The answer could be no if I was going to remember the imagining

and think, This isn’t even the meeting that I had in mind. But if I won’t be

in a position either to complete or to break the referential chain, I would

seem to be imagining a meeting but no meeting in particular.

Thus, anticipating experiences that include the memory of having

been anticipated enables me to secure singular reference to future epi-

sodes in my life. I can also attempt singular reference to future epi-

sodes by means of deﬁnite descriptions, for example, by framing an

image of an encounter under the description ‘the next time I run across

you’. But then I may run across you prematurely on Thursday, where-

upon my deﬁnite description will have sent my reference astray. I could

jury-rig my deﬁnite description to insure against such mishaps, but

that is more trouble than I need to take in thinking about my future.

For I can simply anticipate future episodes and send those anticipa-

tions forward to be assigned future referents by my future selves.

Unlike deﬁnite descriptions, these references aren’t hostage to future

vicissitudes, because they are entrusted to a future subject who will

manage them on my behalf.

I can do the same with beliefs that do not involve mental images. I can

open a mental ﬁle and ﬁll it with anticipatory beliefs about a future

episode, without including any images of what the episode will be like.

Provided that I can rely on a future subject to retrieve the ﬁle and asso-

ciate it with a particular episode in the future, I need not frame a deﬁnite

description sufﬁcient to pick out which episode I have in mind. The ﬁle

will include the belief or intention that its references will be determined

by a future retriever of the ﬁle, but it need not include an image of what

it will be like for that subject to remember what it was like to open the

ﬁle. My expectations about the episode may therefore lack the phenom-

enology of climbing through an image into the future, but they will still

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

include the expectation that the episode will be experienced as having

been hereby expected.

This telegraphic form of downstream reference is what makes a future

subject into my future self. As the visitor to the Empire State Building

associates my anticipatory image with his ongoing experience, attach-

ing features of the image to their referents, he will implicitly attach its

ﬁrst-personal mode of presentation to himself, thereby assigning

himself the role of “me” in the context of the image. I can therefore

frame the image egocentrically and rely on him to provide the ego in

that context, without my having speciﬁed further who I have in mind.

I can of course envision an experience as undergone by someone

explicitly identiﬁed as me, just as I envision it as occurring at a location

explicitly identiﬁed as the Empire State Building. But such an envision-

ing will not be fully ﬁrst-personal if it does not represent the experience

as colored by the memory of having been hereby envisioned. And if it

does represent the experience in that way, then it need not identify the

subject of the experience any further, since it will already have identiﬁed

him as the subject who will associate it with the experience and thereby

determine its references, including its reference to himself.

In this respect, my experiential anticipation is like a message

in a bottle.

Suppose that I am stranded on a desert island and I launch a bottle

containing a note that says, “If you ﬁnd this message and bring it to my

wife in New York, she will reward you with $,.” To whom does ‘you’

refer in the context of my note? It refers to whoever ﬁnds the note. (If the

note is never found, my use of ‘you’ fails to refer.) Alone on my desert

island, I have no one to whom I can refer in the second person—no one

with whom I am, so to speak, on second-personal terms. In casting my

message on the waters, I am hoping to get onto second-personal terms

with someone, by succeeding in my attempt to refer with the pronoun

‘you’. That referential hope is part and parcel of my hope to communi-

cate with someone by way of the message.

So it is with my anticipatory image of a future experience. I compose

an image of a scene as experienced by a subject remembering this image

and acknowledging various features of his experience as the ones that

were hereby anticipated. I hope that there will be a subject to take

himself as “me” in the context of the image, just as I hope that there will

 Persons in Prospect

be a reader to intercept the second-personal reference in my message.

If my hope for the image is fulﬁlled, I will have succeeded in thinking

with it about a future subject as “me.” What I am hoping, then, is to get

onto ﬁrst-personal terms with him, or to communicate with him in

the ﬁrst person.

What matters in survival, I think, is being able to anticipate experiences

as providing closure to these anticipations. Of course, I care whether the

future will answer my expectations in the sense of bearing them out, by

making them true. But I care even more, and more fundamentally,

whether my expectations will be answered in the sense that future

experiences will be felt as resolving them, as if concluding a musical

call-and-response.

I also care about communicating on ﬁrst-personal terms with the

subjects of those experiences. I imagine their experiences “from the

inside” not only in the sense of imagining them from the future subjects’

point of view; I imagine them from a future point of view at which this

very imagining will be accessible in memory, so that my present, antici-

patory point of view will be “inside” the anticipated experiences, and my

present self will be internally accessible to their subjects as “me.” This

“inside” view of their experiences has an intimacy that is heightened by

my reliance on them to determine its references. One important aspect

of intimacy is the ability to dispense with referential cues. We recognize

long-married couples, for example, by their telegraphic style of conver-

sation, in which they use pronouns without antecedents—without even

following one another’s gaze—because of already knowing what is

salient to one another. Similarly, I can think of a future self as “me” and

rely on him to know that I meant him, that is, the self to whom he will

naturally attach the reference.

Because referential cues are the means

of coordinating different points of view, doing without them gives the

impression of occupying a single point of view. Like a long-married

couple, then, I and my future self seem to share a single point of view

because of being referentially in sync.

If I am right about what matters in survival, then the relevant aspect of

psychological connectedness is not the one that interests Parﬁt. What

. This intimacy would be lacking if I were going to undergo ﬁssion, as in the Branch

Line case. I discuss this issue in “Self to Self.”

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

interests Parﬁt, I have argued, is the relation of resemblance between the

termini of psychological connections: the experiences and their corre-

sponding memories, the intentions and the corresponding actions, the

acquired attitudes or traits and their persisting instantiation. These psy-

chological causes and effects often perpetuate various features of mine,

and Parﬁt believes that those features that are distinctive of me, or valu-

able to me, count more than others in constituting what matters in

survival. As I have just argued, however, the aspect of psychological

connectedness that really counts is the causal relation that establishes

an informational channel to carry anticipations forward to their antici-

pated cadences, and to carry future-directed references forward to ﬁnd

their referents, including the future “me.” Whether the same connec-

tions preserve any of my features is relatively unimportant.

My account of what matters in survival thus explains why Parﬁt has

difﬁculty caring ﬁrst-personally about his replica in the Branch Line

case. He can neither store thoughts to be retrieved by his replica nor

retrieve thoughts that are stored by him, and so he can neither expe-

rience his future as responding to the replica’s expectations nor expect

the replica’s future to be experienced as responding to his. The causal

tides can carry no internal messages between them. Even if the replica

ﬁnishes Parﬁt’s current book-project, he will not experience its

completion as fulﬁlling the remembered hopes of Parﬁt’s present self,

and so Parﬁt can no longer aim his hopes at such an experienced

fulﬁllment. As far as he is concerned, his book will be ﬁnished by

someone else—someone who is like him, perhaps, but who is not

himself, because of being in no position to complete the phrases of his

current mental life.

I thus arrive at the conclusion that Parﬁt’s difﬁculty in caring ﬁrst-

personally about his replica is unsurprising for reasons that do not

deprive it of philosophical signiﬁcance. On the contrary, his difﬁculty in

caring ﬁrst-personally about his replica is unsurprising for the very good

reason that he and his replica are not on ﬁrst-personal terms.

My conclusion has implications that reach beyond the realm of science

ﬁction. A person’s replicas are not the only candidate selves from whom

he is causally isolated in a way that blocks internal communication. Also

causally isolated from the person are his other possible selves—that is,

himself as he is in other possible worlds.

 Persons in Prospect

Before embarking on this topic, I will need to regiment my language

carefully. From now on, I will use the term ‘selves’ for those subjects who

are connected to me by the relation that conveys ﬁrst-personal concern.

Since the present question is whether inhabitants of other possible

worlds can bear that relation to me, it amounts to the question whether

I have other possible selves at all. The candidates for selfhood in this case

are inhabitants of other possible worlds who are numerically identical

to the person I am—that is, to David Velleman. I am not questioning

whether David Velleman exists in other possible worlds: clearly he does.

What I am questioning is whether David Velleman as he might have been

is any self of mine.

But what shall we call him in relation to me? We can’t refer to him as

another possible self, since his selfhood with me is the relation that is

currently in question. I propose that we call him my identical.

I often wonder what would have become of me if I hadn’t decided to go

back to graduate school in . Maybe I would have become a

freelance writer. There are possible worlds in which I did become a

freelance writer: in some of them I am living just a few blocks from

where I live today. I wonder whether I have children in those worlds.

And so on.

The James David Velleman living in those worlds diverged from my

actual path in , and since then he has followed a very different path

from mine. My relation to this identical is therefore similar to Parﬁt’s

relation to his replica in the Branch Line case. In order for my concern to

reach the other possible David Velleman, it would have to travel “back-

wards up the Branch Line,” rewinding my years as a philosopher, back to

the moment of my decision to go to graduate school; “and then forwards

down the Main Line,” playing out the life I would have lived if I had

decided to become a writer instead. In my view, this maneuver cannot

convey genuine self-concern, because it does not follow a possible

. In considering this question, I needn’t worry about the metaphysical dispute

between counterpart theorists and theorists who posit strict transworld identities. Whether

another possible David Velleman is related to me in the way that justiﬁes self-concern

doesn’t depend on whether he is strictly identical to me or merely more similar to me than

anyone else in his world. (I do wonder, however, whether the inaccessibility of transworld

identicals to self-concern played a role in David Lewis’s intuitions when he developed his

counterpart theory.)

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

channel of information between me and its object, and so it cannot

direct my concern to someone meaningfully conceived of as “me.”

In short, my relation to the person I would have been in another

possible world does not include what matters in survival. Although I am

the same person as the David Velleman who became a freelance writer,

he is not a self of mine in the sense that calls for me to identify with him,

or to identify my interests with his. He and I may be numerically identi-

cal, but—as Parﬁt himself puts it—identity is not what matters.

Back in , of course, I was in a position to look down many alternative

paths and to compose ﬁrst-personal thoughts that would have suc-

ceeded in picking out the traveler on any one of them, had he been the

one to end up carrying the records of those thoughts along with him,

available for later retrieval from memory. Looking forward, then, I could

have entertained hypothetical self-concern for many different possible

future selves, concern that might in each case have turned out to be

about a future person.

After the point of decision, however, alternative paths were closed to

me not only in practice but also in ﬁrst-personal thought. Whatever

befalls the travelers on those paths is what would have befallen David

Velleman, if I had decided differently, but his being David Velleman is, so

to speak, nothing to me: it doesn’t matter in the same way as my being

the one who might undergo different fates in the future depending on

what I now decide.

Here is a reason for not regretting what might have been—a reason

other than the ordinary, pragmatic reason that nothing can be done

about it. Regretting what I actually did is perfectly rational, since

memory puts me on ﬁrst-personal terms with the agent who did it: he is

my past self in every respect relevant to self-concern. But the person who

. Thanks to Elena Weinstein for making this connection. As Matthew Hanser has

pointed out to me, this conception of what matters in survival helps to explain why, as

Lucretius observed, we want to die later but don’t regret not having been born earlier. We

cannot complete psychological cadences for the past selves who would have been born

earlier, but we can start psychological cadences for our longer-lived future selves to com-

plete. Some explain the difference by arguing that we would not have been identical with a

person born earlier. (See Thomas Nagel, “Death,” in Mortal Questions [New York: Cam-

bridge University Press, ].) I think that the explanation does not depend on the neces-

sity of our origins. Even if we could have been identical with an earlier-born person, our

relation to that person lacks what matters in survival.

 Persons in Prospect

might be better off today if I had done differently in the past—that person

is inaccessible to my self-concern. Of course he is who I might have been,

but his fate is no more pertinent to me than anyone else’s, since I can

only imagine undergoing that fate.

Yet if regretting what might have been is truly irrational, then being

relieved about what is may be irrational as well, insofar as it involves a

comparison between the two. The merely possible people whose misfor-

tunes I have skirted by making wise decisions are identical with me in

some metaphysical sense, but our identity does not give me ﬁrst-

personal access to them. I can rationally celebrate what I have done

and who I have become, but not in a way that involves comparison

with the alternatives—not, at least, if my celebration is to be

rationally self-interested.

My view bears implications for our concepts of harm and beneﬁt. These

concepts are implicitly comparative: a person is beneﬁted when he is

made better off, harmed when he is made worse off. The question is,

Better or worse than what? According to my view, the answer should not

be, Better or worse than he might have been.

A harm should be something that makes sense for the person to

regret, in proportion to the degree of harm; a beneﬁt should be some-

thing about which it makes sense for him to feel gratiﬁed, in proportion

to the degree of beneﬁt.

And these emotions make sense only as the

person’s responses to comparisons of his actual welfare with that of his

other possible selves. Does it make sense for him to feel gratiﬁed that his

interests are better fulﬁlled than someone’s might have been? Does it

make sense for him to regret that his interests are less fulﬁlled than

someone’s might have been? Not unless the latter person is an object of

self-concern. Faring better or worse than a possible person for whom he

lacks self-concern might provide grounds for feeling smug or envious,

perhaps, but not for feeling regret or gratiﬁcation. And differences that

do not provide grounds for regret or gratiﬁcation should not qualify as

harms or beneﬁts.

Harm and beneﬁt should rather be conceived as making a person

better or worse off than he formerly was, and hence as involving a tem-

poral rather than counterfactual comparison. Now, this temporal

. These statements are supported by a theory of value that I will expound in Part III.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

conception of harm and beneﬁt might seem to imply that people cannot

be harmed if they are very badly off to begin with—in other words, if they

have nothing to lose. But even as my view plays down the importance of

counterfactual possibilities, it plays up the importance of future possi-

bilities, where multiple alternatives are still accessible to self-concern.

And we can assess how something affects a person’s interests by consid-

ering not only his current quality of life but also his future prospects.

Something can harm a person by damaging his prospects, or beneﬁt

him by improving them. Thus, the comparisons relevant to a person’s

interests are comparisons of possible futures, and events impinge on

the person’s interests by altering those possibilities. He can be beneﬁted

or harmed by being caused to have better or worse possible futures than

he previously had. Someone who has nothing to lose may yet have plenty

to gain, and we can easily harm him by putting those possible gains

out of reach.

This conception of harm and beneﬁt enhances our understanding of

the non-identity problem. Surely, the right way to assess how our

despoiling the earth and depleting its resources will affect future genera-

tions is to consider how we will thereby constrain their prospects, the

possible futures accessible to them when they come into existence. Just

as surely, however, we cannot make their prospects any worse than they

will formerly have been, since people have no prospects at all until they

exist. How, then, can our irresponsible behavior affect the interests of

future generations at birth?

. This conception of harm and beneﬁt raises questions that I will not be able to

answer here. For example: Can I harm someone by creating a dire prospect for him, or

beneﬁt him by creating a favorable possibility, even if it is never realized? In one sense, the

possibility’s not being realized means that no harm (or beneﬁt) has been done. In another

sense, however, I have already done him a bad or a good turn, no matter what happens.

In general, I doubt whether we can be satisﬁed with a single, unambiguous conception of

harm or beneﬁt. For discussion of these concepts, see Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Wrongful

Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Signiﬁcance of Harm,” Legal Theory  (): –

; Matthew Hanser, “Harming Future People,” Philosophy & Public Affairs  (): –,

and “The Metaphysics of Harm” (forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research); Elizabeth Harman, “Can We Harm and Beneﬁt in Creating?” Philosophical Per-

spectives  (): –.

. Of course, our irresponsible behavior can cause future generations to become pro-

gressively worse off during their lives, and so it can cause them harm in the diachronic

sense that I have deﬁned. What it cannot do is cause them to be harmed at birth

via their inheritance.

 Persons in Prospect

The non-identity problem now looks more problematic than before.

The problem no longer depends on the improbability of each person’s

existence, in light of which alternative policies cannot harm or beneﬁt

future generations because of being likely to change their membership

instead. As it now appears, even if our depleting or conserving resources

would not affect the membership of future generations—even if the

same people would exist in either alternative—those people would have

no self-interested grounds on which to compare their actual lot to what

it would otherwise have been, because self-concern does not extend

to other possible worlds; and they would of course be in no position to

compare their lot to what it was before they ever existed. Our power

to make a difference to future generations via their inheritance therefore

seems even more limited than it did before; indeed, it seems to be nil.

Precisely because we cannot harm or beneﬁt future persons via their

inheritance, however, our moral relation to them should not be con-

ceived in terms of harm and beneﬁt in the ﬁrst place. When affecting

their interests seemed merely improbable, because of the likelihood that

we would affect their existence instead, the concepts of harm and beneﬁt

still seemed applicable. But if harming or beneﬁting them via their inher-

itance is metaphysically impossible, then our role as malefactors or

benefactors is morally irrelevant, and our moral relation to them must be

conceived in different terms.

In some sense, then, the non-identity problem looks less problematic.

We cannot rationalize our irresponsible behavior on the grounds that its

ill consequences for future generations will be outweighed by the

accompanying beneﬁts of existence. Nor can we rationalize it on the

grounds that future generations will at least be no worse off than they

might have been. The rationalization “No harm done” will be not so

much ineffective as irrelevant. Where harm is strictly impossible, not

having done any is nothing to brag about.

In short, we have now eliminated both the inculpating and the excul-

pating considerations out of which the non-identity problem was con-

structed. The question remains, of course, how to understand our moral

relations to future persons. I will turn to that question in Parts II and III.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

ii. the gift of life

They will arrange for the suckling of the children by bringing their

mothers to the nursery when their breasts are still full, taking every

precaution to see that no mother recognizes her child.

—Plato, Republic V.ii.e

Nor is there any way of preventing brothers and children and fathers

and mothers from sometimes recognizing one another; for children

are born like their parents, and they will necessarily be ﬁnding indi-

cations of their relationship to one another.

—Aristotle, Politics II.iii.a

Many people are grateful to their parents for giving them a gift consisting

in life itself. Life itself is an odd sort of gift, since there is no one around

antecedently to serve as its intended recipient.

Life is at best a beneﬁt

that prospective parents toss into the void in the hope that someone will

turn out to have snagged it, to his own surprise as much as anyone’s. But

once parents have performed this random act of kindness, they may be

thought to have no further obligation to the future beneﬁciary, for whom

they have already done more than anyone will ever again be able to do.

Of course, babies are needy creatures, and their biological parents

generally bear the burden of seeing to it that their needs are met. This

allocation of childcare duties may be no more than a social convenience,

however, taking advantage of the biological fact that at least one of the

parents is bound to be on the scene when the needy creature makes

its appearance. Maybe alternative childcare arrangements would be just

as good, if only they could be institutionalized, as Plato famously imag-

ined. If proximity to the birth is all that biological parents have going

for them as caregivers, Plato’s scheme for community nurseries may

be worth considering.

This essay was presented to the Legal Theory Working Group at the Baldy Center,

University of Buffalo, and to the Legal Theory Workshop at the University of Toronto Law

School. I also had helpful discussions or correspondence on the topic with Jules Coleman,

Daniela Dover, Robin Jeshion, Arthur Ripstein, Brian Slattery, and Paul F. Velleman.

. As Matthew Hanser pointed out, no one can act with the intention of bringing a

particular person into existence (“Harming Future People,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 

[]: –, at p. ).

 Persons in Prospect

Aristotle criticized this scheme as unrealistic. Children who are not

seen as the sons and daughters of anyone in particular will not be prop-

erly cared for, he thought; and in any case, people will seek out their own

parents, children, and siblings, despite all efforts to keep them apart. As

Aristotle realized, human beings have a natural tendency to ﬁnd and

associate with their biological relatives.

Today we can explain this tendency in evolutionary terms, since it

enables each human organism to promote the propagation of his geno-

type and to beneﬁt from the like tendency of his relatives. But the aims of

natural selection need not be ours. If the human tendency to congregate

in biological families is a vestige of natural selection, then it may be like

the capacity for murderous jealousy, for example—a natural tendency

that human society has no reason to accommodate. Certainly, the

human afﬁnity for consanguines is implicated in such regrettable human

phenomena as racism and xenophobia. Maybe it should be killed in the

cradle, as Plato suggested.

Still, that’s not what modern-day readers of The Republic think; they

think that Plato’s scheme for child rearing is inhumane. Why do they

think so? What would be wrong with permanently separating parents

and children at birth?

I think that associating with relatives is more than a biological impera-

tive; it’s a personal need, imposed on persons like us by our predicament

as human beings. Because I believe that biological ties have value, I also

believe that there are good reasons for assigning the duties of childrear-

ing to biological parents in the ﬁrst instance. Indeed, I believe that the act

of procreation generates parental obligations that cannot be contracted

out to others, except when doing so is in the best interests of the child.

These obligations arise because being begotten is not, as many

believe, the original birthday present. As Seana Shiffrin has argued in a

brilliant paper on claims of “wrongful life,” being brought into existence

is at best a mixed blessing, and those who confer it are not entitled to

walk away congratulating themselves on a job well done.

. For a different defense of the same position, see Rivka Weinberg, “The Moral Com-

plexity of Sperm Donation” (forthcoming in Bioethics).

. Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Signiﬁ-

cance of Harm,” Legal Theory  (): –. Brad Inwood has directed me to Seneca’s De

Beneﬁciis, Book , Sections –. For example: “[I]t is a pretty trivial beneﬁt for a father and

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

Shiffrin argues that bringing someone into existence is a morally

equivocal act, because it entails imposing harms on the person as well as

bestowing beneﬁts. Shiffrin argues further that a fundamental asymme-

try between harms and beneﬁts prevents the harm imposed by procre-

ation from being justiﬁed by the beneﬁt bestowed. And Shiffrin attempts

to explain the asymmetry by proposing a philosophical account of harm,

although she does not develop it fully.

Now, although I agree with Shiffrin that bringing someone into exist-

ence is a morally equivocal act, I do not think that it can be equivocal

because of conferring a mixture of harms and beneﬁts. For as I explained

in Part I, I believe that a person can be neither harmed nor beneﬁted by

being brought into existence. I will therefore devote the ﬁrst half of this

part to paraphrasing Shiffrin’s arguments in slightly different terms,

by drawing out elements, already implicit in them, of an Aristotelian

conception of human well-being. I will then draw some conclusions

that are congruent with Shiffrin’s and a few more that I doubt whether

she would endorse.

The best way to explain Shiffrin’s conception of harm, I think, is to apply

it, not to cases of harm per se, but to the philosophical problem of

distinguishing between pain and suffering. That pain and suffering are

distinct is obvious from the many cases of pain that do not occasion

suffering (stubbed toes, skinned knees), as well as cases of suffering that

do not necessarily involve pain (loneliness, boredom).

What makes the difference between pain and suffering is coping.

Suffering occurs when someone cannot or does not cope with adversity

of some kind. To cope with pain or other adversity is to exercise, or to

give oneself the sense of exercising, some degree of control over the

mother to sleep together unless there are additional beneﬁts to follow up on this initial

gift and to consolidate it with additional services to the child. It is not living which is

the good, but living well. And I do live well. But I could have lived badly” [Section ,

Inwood’s translation].

. That the goods and ills of existence are in some sense asymmetric is an intuition

discussed by several philosophers. See, e.g., Trudy Govier, “What Should We Do About

Future People?” American Philosophical Quarterly  (): –; David Benatar, “Why It

Is Better Never to Come Into Existence,” American Philosophical Quarterly  (): –

; Michael Tooley, “Value, Obligation and the Asymmetry Question,” Bioethics  ():

–. The issue is discussed by Parﬁt, Reasons and Persons, p. .

 Persons in Prospect

adversity itself or, at least, over one’s reactions to it. Coping is therefore

a way of exercising one’s will in the face of adverse circumstances, by

managing one’s response to them and maybe also by managing the

circumstances themselves.

When someone fails to cope, we describe him as going to pieces,

falling apart, breaking down—all expressions that reﬂect damage not

just to the body or to personal projects but to the self.

Failure to cope

entails damage to the self because it entails a defeat or disabling of the

will. The person is thrown into a condition of helplessness in the face of

some obstacle or assault. Stripped of his agency, he is damaged in his

very personhood. The fact and the experience of this damage to the self

are constitutive of suffering.

This brief account of suffering echoes Shiffrin’s account of harm. She

suggests that harm consists in a condition toward which a person ﬁnds

himself in a position of passive subjection—the position, as Shiffrin puts

it, of an “endurer.” She thus reverses the order of explanation between

the badness of harm and our unwillingness to undergo it. It’s not that

we’re unwilling to undergo something harmful because it’s bad; rather,

something is bad enough to qualify as harmful if and because we ﬁnd

ourselves undergoing it unwillingly.

Shiffrin also brieﬂy suggests a corresponding account of beneﬁt. What

she says is that unsought beneﬁts are not as good as beneﬁts that

the recipient has chosen to pursue and has succeeded in obtaining.

She thereby suggests that, while being passively withstood is

constitutive of harm, being actively sought and attained is at least

characteristic of beneﬁt.

These remarks about harm and beneﬁt ground Shiffrin’s explanation

of the asymmetry between the harms and beneﬁts entailed in the gift of

life. In Shiffrin’s view, the asymmetry arises from the fact that the gift of

life is never sought or even accepted by its recipient. He simply becomes

. For this account of suffering, see Eric J. Cassell, “Recognizing Suffering,” Hastings

Center Report  (): –. See also Kathy Charmaz, “Loss of Self: A Fundamental Form

of Suffering in the Chronically Ill,” Sociology of Health and Illness  (): –.

. Because coping is an exercise of the will, it requires choice on the part of the subject.

That’s why we can sometimes think that people have chosen to suffer, although we’re never

quite sure. There is no clear line between inability and unwillingness to cope, but there

certainly are cases in which someone could cope but chooses not to; or maybe he cannot

choose to cope.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

aware, long after the fact, of having been stuck with it. Even if the recipi-

ent welcomes this gift retrospectively, his will was nevertheless pre-

empted when it was given to him, since he had no chance to refuse or

accept. The harms that accompany this gift are consequently aggravated

by having been imposed on him willy-nilly, with the result that he is

already in a relation of passive subjection to them from the start. And the

associated beneﬁts are somewhat undermined by lacking the features of

choice and successful effort that belong to the most signiﬁcant beneﬁts.

Thus Shiffrin. Much as I admire her attempt to explain the asymmetry

between the goods and ills of existence, I do not believe that a balance of

goods and ills can account for what is morally equivocal about procre-

ation. Still, I think that her explanation points us in the right direction, by

pointing us toward an Aristotelian conception of human well-being.

According to Aristotle, human well-being consists in the exercise of

capacities that are in excellent condition, and pleasure is that complete

absorption in the exercise of one’s capacities which their being in excel-

lent condition tends to facilitate.

The excellent condition of one’s

capacities is what Aristotle called aretê. His claim that pleasure consists

in being absorbed or engrossed in exercising one’s capacities has been

conﬁrmed by research into what psychologists call “ﬂow.”

Aristotle’s conceptions of well-being and pleasure are hospitable to

Shiffrin’s account of harm and its asymmetrical relation to beneﬁt. Any-

thing that casts a person into a state of passive subjection will prevent

him from exercising his capacities, and it will also deprive him of the

enjoyment of becoming absorbed in their exercise. Conversely, any good

that is acquired through the exercise of the relevant capacities will bring

with it a bonus of ﬂourishing and “ﬂow,” like a destination that lies at the

end of an engrossing journey.

I think that Aristotle’s conceptions of human well-being and pleasure

also carry implications for the value of the so-called gift of life, because

they imply that human happiness takes work. It takes work in the form

of exercising one’s proper capacities; more importantly, it takes work

. ‘Well-being’ and ‘ﬂourishing’ are not precise equivalents for Aristotle’s eudaimonia,

since they can be achieved at a particular time, whereas eudaimonia can be achieved only

over the course of an entire life.

. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York:

Harper and Row, ).

 Persons in Prospect

because the relevant capacities must be acquired by practice and

habituation. In this respect, humans are unlike other animals, whose

well-being consists mostly in the exercise of capacities that are innate. A

cat is born already equipped for the activities that will constitute its

ﬂourishing; a human being must be educated and trained for his

most rewarding activities.

According to the Aristotelian view, then, a human child is born with

the general, second-order capacity to acquire the further, speciﬁc

capacities whose exercise will eventually constitute its ﬂourishing as

an adult. The gift of life is therefore the gift of an opportunity—the

opportunity to do the work and thereby gain the reward of human

well-being.

This opportunity is accompanied by a corresponding threat and a

corresponding risk. The threat is that if the child doesn’t undertake the

work prerequisite to ﬂourishing, it will suffer harm. And we can now see

that it will be harmed quite literally, because without the capacities

needed for human ﬂourishing, the child will ﬁnd itself in a position of

passive subjection to its circumstances, lacking the resources to cope

with them. The corresponding risk is that even if the child accepts

the challenge of ﬂourishing, it may nevertheless fail. (The streets of

every large U.S. city are littered with individuals who are not coping

with their circumstances, or are coping only poorly, and who are

consequently faring poorly.)

The opportunity wrapped up in the gift of life is thus an offer of the

sort that the child cannot refuse. To be born as a human being is to be

handed a job of work, with a promise of great rewards for success, a

threat of great harm for refusal, and a risk of similar harm for failure. The

scene on which a human child appears willy-nilly is the scene of a pre-

dicament, a challenge with very high stakes. Hence the so-called gift of

life is indeed a mixed blessing, as Shiffrin claims.

Shiffrin and other philosophers tend to view parental obligations

as arising from the harms and beneﬁts that parents confer on children

by bringing them into existence. As I argued in the previous part,

however, parents are metaphysically incapable of conferring either

harms or beneﬁts in that way. The Aristotelian spin that I have now put

on Shiffrin’s arguments enables me to conceive of parental obligations

in different terms.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

What is equivocal about procreation is not that it confers both ben-

eﬁts and harms on the resulting child; what’s equivocal is that it throws

that child into a predicament, confronts it with a challenge in which the

stakes are high, both for good and for ill. Moreover, it is a challenge that

no child can meet without the daily assistance of others over the course

of many years, since the human infant is not at all equipped to acquire

the necessary capacities on its own.

Consider the hackneyed example of a child who is drowning at the

deep end of a swimming pool. People lounging around the pool obvi-

ously have an obligation to rescue the child. But the obligation to ﬁsh the

child out doesn’t fall on the bystanders equally if one of them pushed the

child in. The one responsible for the child’s predicament is not just a

bystander like the others, and he bears the principal obligation.

Obviously, if the responsible party cannot or will not help the child,

then others are obligated to act. The child has a right to be saved by

somebody if not by the person who caused its predicament. But just as

obviously, the person who pushed the child into the pool should have

considered beforehand, not just whether someone or other would come

to its assistance, but whether he himself was willing and able to fulﬁll the

obligation of assistance that he was about to incur. You shouldn’t go

pushing children into the deep end if you aren’t willing to get wet.

Likewise with procreation and parenting. In my view, parents who

throw a child into the predicament of human life have an obligation to

lend the assistance it needs to cope with that predicament, by helping it to

acquire the capacities whose exercise will enable it to ﬂourish and whose

lack would cause it to suffer. By choosing to create a child, perhaps even by

choosing to have sex, adults take the chance of incurring this obligation.

To risk incurring the obligation without intending to fulﬁll it is irrespon-

sible; actually to incur it and then not to fulﬁll it is immoral.

I will shortly consider whether it is morally permissible for biological

parents to delegate this obligation to others. Is the obligation incurred

through the act of procreation an obligation to see that the child receives

the needed assistance in coping with the human predicament? Or is it an

obligation to render that assistance oneself, in person?

. Jeff Sebo has directed me to Sidgwick’s remarks on the subject: “This . . . we might

partly classify under . . . duties arising out of special needs: for no doubt children are

 Persons in Prospect

Of course, parental obligations must sometimes be transferable in

practice. A child has a right to grow up in the care of parents who are

willing and able to care for it. If its biological parents do not rise to the

task, then the child has a right to adoptive parents who are willing and

able to take their place. Thus, the mere unwillingness of biological

parents to discharge their obligations may be sufﬁcient to ensure that

those obligations may be transferred to others, in deference to the rights

of the child.

But this practical accommodation does not mean that the biological

parents are morally permitted to abdicate their responsibilities at will.

We do not think that parents are permitted to relinquish a newborn for

adoption because of a last-minute social engagement, for example, or

dismay at the size of its ears.

More importantly, we don’t think that adults are permitted to con-

ceive a child with the prior intention to put it up for adoption. A woman

may not decide to conceive simply in order to have the experience or

health beneﬁts of pregnancy, we think, no matter how conﬁdent she may

be of ﬁnding suitable adoptive parents to take over her subsequent

responsibilities. Thus, we regard parental obligations as transferable,

morally speaking, only under exigencies that make their transfer beneﬁ-

cial for the child rather than convenient for the parents.

In one case, however, we tolerate a practice equivalent to creating a

child for adoption. Those who “donate” their sperm and eggs play their

role in conceiving children whom they have no intention of parenting.

Indeed, they play their role in conception precisely on the condition that

they will never be called upon to deal with the resulting children, a

naturally objects of compassion, on account of their helplessness, to others besides their

parents. On the latter they have a claim of a different kind, springing from the universally

recognized duty of not causing pain or any harm to other human beings, directly or

indirectly, except in the way of deserved punishment: for the parent, being the cause of the

child’s existing in a helpless condition, would be indirectly the cause of the suffering and

death that would result to it if neglected. Still this does not seem an adequate explanation

of parental duty, as recognised by Common Sense. For we commonly blame a parent who

leaves his children entirely to the care of others, even if he makes ample provision for their

being nourished and trained up to the time at which they can support themselves by their

own labour. We think that he owes them affection (as far as this can be said to be a duty)

and the tender and watchful care that naturally springs from affection: and, if he can afford

it, somewhat more than the necessary minimum of food, clothing, and education” (The

Methods of Ethics [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, ], p. ).

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

condition readily accepted by those who purchase their gametes, which

would be unacceptable if they came with parental strings attached.

Why do we condone the antecedent intention to transfer parental obli-

gations in this case?

Before I discuss the transferability of parental obligations, I want to

discuss a different question raised by donor conception, about the pro-

vision that one must be able to make for future children in order to be

justiﬁed in creating them. People should not create children for whom

they cannot provide adequately; but what is an adequate provision? In

particular, does an adequate provision require an opportunity for the

child to know and be reared by its biological parents?

Here I am using the word ‘adequate’ in a sense that is relativized to a

particular decision, namely, the decision whether to create a child. Most

adoptive parents make more than adequate provision for their adopted

children, but the relevant standard of adequacy is premised on the chil-

dren’s already existing and needing a home. My question is what provi-

sion for a child is adequate to justify the decision to create it, in the ﬁrst

place. And my view is that the standard of adequacy applicable to the

procreative decision is different from the standard applicable to deci-

sions made after the child already exists.

My arguments in Part I imply that the adequacy of a child’s initial

provision is not relative to what could have been provided to the self-

same child. The child will not be in a position to identify his interests

with those of the better- or worse-provisioned children he might have

been. From the child’s perspective, the better or worse starts he could

have had in life will not be a matter of self-interest, because his self-

concern will extend only to his actual present and possible future selves,

not to children inhabiting possible histories that will already have

diverged from reality. When the child compares the hand he has been

dealt at birth with those he might have been dealt, he will not be able to

see himself as ahead or behind in the game of life; he will only see himself

as starting a life that amounts to a whole new game. Hence what could

. My discussion of donor conception will be conﬁned to the typical case of anony-

mous donation between strangers. Cases of donation within families, or of “open” dona-

tion, are signiﬁcantly different in respects that would call for different treatment.

 Persons in Prospect

have been provided to him in particular is not especially relevant to the

standard of an adequate provision.

A standard that philosophers sometimes apply to procreative deci-

sions is whether the resulting child would have “a life worth living.” In

Part III of this series, I will argue that this phrase has no meaning that can

apply to procreative decisions. ‘A life worth living’ can mean “a life worth

continuing,” but procreative decisions concern whether a life should be

started, not whether to continue it. Alternatively, ‘a life worth living’ can

mean “a life not to be regretted,” but I will argue that people are biased

against regretting their existence by considerations that depend on their

already existing, considerations that are irrelevant to the decision

whether to bring them into existence. In any case, what’s barely prefer-

able to nonexistence is not enough for a child by the standard of

adequacy that I consider appropriate.

The standard that I consider appropriate does not peg a child’s initial

provision at any particular level of happiness or well-being. Hence it is

not what philosophers call a person-affecting standard; it is rather a

personhood-respecting standard.

An adequate initial provision for a

child, in my view, is one that expresses due consideration for the impor-

tance of human life.

When creating human life, we are obligated to show due consideration

for it, not just for its individual possessors. The importance of human life

itself forbids us to treat it lightly in creating it.

Human life is important because it is a predicament faced by a creature

that matters—that is, by a person, whose success at facing it will entail the

ﬂowering of personhood, and whose failure will entail a disﬁgurement of

that value, in the form of damage to the self. Just as we are obligated to

realize the value of personhood in ourselves, so we are obligated, in

creating human lives, to create ones in which that value is most likely to

ﬂower and least likely to be disﬁgured. In this respect, the importance of

human life is like the importance of art—the kind of importance that

makes something worth creating well if worth creating at all.

Due consideration for the importance of human life requires us to

ensure that the human race does not go extinct, but it does not require us

. For a similar view, see Rahul Kumar, “Who Can Be Wronged?” Philosophy & Public

Affairs  (): –.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

to create any particular human lives, or any particular number of them.

With respect to individual lives, it mainly requires that we avoid creating

lives that will already be truncated or damaged in ways that seriously

affect the prospects for personhood to be fully realized within them.

I claim that a life estranged from its ancestry is already truncated in this

way. This claim is no less than universal common sense—though it is

also no more, I readily admit. I cannot derive it from moral principles; I

can at best offer some reﬂections on why we should trust rather than

override common sense in this instance.

When I say that my claim is universal common sense, I mean that

people everywhere and always have based their social relationships, in

the ﬁrst instance, on relations of kinship, of which the basic building

block is the relation between parent and child. Not every society has

favored the nuclear family, of course, but virtually every society has

reared children among their kin and in the knowledge of who their bio-

logical parents are. The universal consensus on this matter is enshrined

in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article ,

paragraph , states: “The child shall be registered immediately after birth

and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a

nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by

his or her parents.”

. The Convention is posted at 〈http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu/b/kcrc.htm〉.

See Eric Blyth and Abigail Farrand, “Anonymity in Donor-Assisted Conception and the UN

Convention on the Rights of the Child,” International Journal of Children’s Rights  ():

–. The Implementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Child makes

clear that the term ‘parents’ in this clause includes biological parents in the ﬁrst instance,

and that the Convention therefore militates against the practice of anonymous gamete

donation (Rachel Hodgkin and Peter Newell, Implementation Handbook for the Conven-

tion on the Rights of the Child [UNICEF, revised edition ], pp. –).

For some social-scientiﬁc and legal perspectives, with further references, see Michael

Freeman, “The New Birth Right? Identity and the Child of the Reproductive Revolution,”

The International Journal of Children’s Rights  (): –; Amanda J. Turner and Adrian

Coyle, “What Does It Mean to Be a Donor Offspring? The Identity Experiences of Adults

Conceived by Donor Insemination and the Implications for Counselling and Therapy,”

Human Reproduction  (): –; Lucy Frith, “Gamete Donation and Anonymity,”

Human Reproduction  (): –; Truth and the Child: A Contribution to the Debate on

the Warnock Report, ed. N. Bruce, A. Mitchell, and K. Priestley (Edinburgh: Family Care,

); Truth and the Child  Years On: Information Exchange in Donor Assisted Conception,

ed. Eric Blyth, Marilyn Crawshaw, and Jennifer Speirs (Birmingham: British Association of

Social Workers, ).

 Persons in Prospect

When people deny the importance of biological ties, I wonder how

they can read world literature with any comprehension. How do they

make any sense of Telemachus, who goes in search of a father he cannot

remember? What do they think is the dramatic engine of the Oedipus

story? When the adoptive grandson of Pharaoh says, “I have been a

stranger in a strange land,” what do they think he means? How can they

even understand the colloquy between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker?

Surely, the revelation “I am your father” should strike them as a piece of

dramatic stupidity—a remark to be answered, “So what?”

As the stories of Telemachus, Oedipus, Moses, and even Luke Sky-

walker illustrate, people unacquainted with their origins have been seen

throughout history as dramatically, even tragically disadvantaged. There

must be some reason why people living at different places and times,

under very different conditions, have converged on the opinion that

a relationship with biological parents is essential to the minimally

adequate provision for a child. To be sure, other articles of age-old con-

sensus have been rejected fairly recently in history—the permissibility of

slavery, for example. But they have been rejected on the basis of soul-

searching reﬂection, whereas the rise of donor conception has been

driven by the procreative preferences of adults, with little thought for

the children involved.

Ironically, the preferences of these adults are often based on the same

common sense that ought to raise questions on behalf of the children.

The reason for resorting to donor conception, after all, is usually the

desire of an adult to have a biologically related child despite lacking a

partner with whom he or she can conceive. Yet whereas the parent will

be just as fully related to the child as any mother or father, the child will

know only half of its biological ancestry. These adults seek to enlarge

their own circle of consanguinity by creating children who will never

know half of theirs. Where is the common sense in that?

The material cited here argues that donor-conceived offspring should have access to

information about their biological parents. In this part I argue for a stronger conclusion—

that donor conception as usually practiced is wrong. In my view, the reasons for conclud-

ing that children should have access to information about their biological parents support

the stronger conclusion that, other things being equal, children should be reared by their

biological parents. For many children already born, other things are not at all equal, and

adoption is therefore desirable; but as I argue below, other things are indeed equal for

children who have not yet been conceived.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

As I have said, I cannot prove that knowing and being reared by biologi-

cal parents is part of the minimally adequate provision for a child;

the best I can do is to make plausible the venerable and worldwide

conviction to that effect. People have tried living in vastly diverse ways,

but they have almost always settled on lifeways that accord central

importance to biological family ties. Let me offer some considerations

that may explain why.

Part of the task facing a human being is to ﬁnd goals and activities in

pursuit of which to develop and exercise the capacities relevant to

human ﬂourishing. A human being needs to ﬁnd work, employment: he

needs, as we say, to get a life. A cat does not need to get a life: it instinc-

tively does what it needs to do in order to do well. Getting a life is a task

peculiar to the human being, who is not born to do anything in particu-

lar, and must therefore ﬁgure out what to do with himself.

A human being accomplishes this task by becoming a self worth doing

one thing rather than another with. That is, he forms an identity—a

complement of traits and attitudes, reﬂected in a self-image by which to

guide their expression in practice. The task of identity formation is not

optional for a human being. As soon as he acquires the cognitive where-

withal to ask, “Who am I?” and “What am I like?,” he is obliged to start

coming up with answers, in order to form a speciﬁc identity for which

there will be speciﬁc ways of ﬂourishing.

The task of forming an identity is carried out on raw materials that

are not inﬁnitely plastic. A human being begins life with a somewhat

determinate temperament and set of aptitudes, which can be kneaded

into many different shapes but not into just any shape whatsoever.

These individual raw materials are present at birth, as determined by

the child’s genetic endowment (and perhaps by the intrauterine

environment as well).

Research on twins and adoptees has shown that many psychological

characteristics are heritable to a considerable degree. Genetic differ-

ences are responsible for a proportion of the variance between people

. As Sophia Moreau has pointed out to me, there are cultures in which one’s identity

is largely dictated by social convention. Even within these cultures, however, the individual

remains responsible for a signiﬁcant degree of self-deﬁnition. From our cultural distance,

the nineteenth-century British housemaid seems to have been stamped with a prefabri-

cated identity; below stairs, however, that housemaid may have been no less self-deﬁned

than we are today.

 Persons in Prospect

not only in IQ (somewhere above  percent) but also for the variance in

their traits of personality such as extraversion, conscientiousness, agree-

ableness, and openness to experience (around  percent); in whether

their interests are artistic, social, enterprising, or conventional (around

 percent); in their inclination toward authoritarian or conservative

attitudes (around  percent); and even in their degree of religiousness

(around  percent).

These measures of heritability are manifested, for

example, in greater similarity between identical twins than between fra-

ternal twins, or between biological siblings reared apart than between

unrelated children reared together. In many cases, the effects of genetic

endowment tend to increase with age, possibly because the inﬂuence of

guardians wanes. As people approach adulthood, in other words, they

come into their genetic inheritance.

Thus, the predicament into which you were born, though generically

human in many respects, was also highly individual, because it required

you to fashion an identity out of a genetically inherited supply of

raw materials. The possibilities and constraints inherent in those

materials gradually came to the fore as you grew up and formed

your adult identity.

A few people in the world had already coped or were already coping

with predicaments similar to yours in its distinctive features—namely,

your biological parents and siblings. Not only did each of your parents

form an identity out of a genetic endowment half of which was

to become half of yours, but also they jointly forged an identity as a

couple, by reconciling between themselves the manifestations of what

were to become the two halves of your genetic endowment. Or that’s

. My argument does not rest on any particular quantitative measures of heritability. I

cite these statistics only for the sake of suggesting a rough order of magnitude to which

psychological traits are probably heritable. In considering the statistics, keep in mind that

what accounts for variance among individuals does not necessarily account for variance

among groups. For example, individual variance in skin color is largely heritable, but the

variance between lifeguards and coal miners is almost entirely due to environment.

The statistics cited here are drawn from Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., “Genetic Inﬂuence on

Human Psychological Traits: A Survey,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 

(): –. On the heritability of values and religious attitudes, see Laura B. Koenig and

Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., “Genetic and Environmental Inﬂuences on the Traditional Moral

Values Triad—Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Religiousness—as Assessed by Quan-

titative Behavior Genetic Methods,” in Where God and Science Meet; How Brain and Evo-

lutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, Volume I: Evolution, Genes, and the

Religious Brain, ed. Patrick McNamara (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, ), pp. –.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

what they did if they were a couple. For that very reason, however, you

stood to beneﬁt from their being a couple; and for similar reasons, you

stood to beneﬁt from their rearing you together with your biological

siblings, if any.

This claim depends on an assumption about heritability that is politi-

cally incorrect, I know. We are supposed to believe that every child is

born with the capacity to fulﬁll any arbitrary human aspiration. In

private, however, most parents realize that part of their job is to help

their child form realistic aspirations, folded into an identity in which it

can truly ﬂourish; and they realize that their ability to do so is greatly

enhanced by their ability to recognize in the child various traits, inclina-

tions, and aptitudes that they have seen before, either in themselves or in

other members of the family.

In the ﬁrst instance, of course, family resemblance is physical, and family

members usually value the physical resemblances among them. There is

a temptation to dismiss this attitude as shallow, but I think that it

expresses a deep human need. For as human beings, we need to recon-

cile our identities as persons with our identities as animals.

The structure of human memory is such as to elicit an identiﬁcation

between the self who remembers and the self of the experience retrieved

from memory.

Locke thought of that identiﬁcation as constituting per-

sonal identity. Even if his metaphysics was shaky, his phenomenology

was impeccable: we certainly seem to have existed at whatever times and

places we remember experiencing, so that our sense of persisting

through time does not depend on reidentifying our bodies on different

occasions. Our relation to our bodies can therefore seem to be contin-

gent. We feel embodied in but not identical to our bodies, and so we can

imagine, for example, swapping bodies with other people.

. My arguments in Part I imply that the beneﬁt in question consisted, not in a coun-

terfactual life-history that would have been preferable, but rather in an improvement that

could have been brought about in your actual future prospects. Of course, if your parents

conceived you with the intention of transferring their parental obligations to others, then

this beneﬁt may have been ruled out before you existed, hence before you had any future

prospects to be improved. As I explain at the end of this part, however, it would have been

wrong of your parents to conceive a child with the intention of refusing to provide the

relevant beneﬁt when it became possible to provide it.

. I discussed this phenomenon in Part I, and I have discussed it before in “Self to Self”

and “So It Goes.”

 Persons in Prospect

To be born in a human body is thus to be susceptible to alienation

from it. We are probably the only animals capable of feeling uncomfort-

able in our own bodies, even hating them—and loving them, too, for that

matter. Coming to terms with our bodily selves is thus a part of

the human predicament.

A connection to biological parents helps us to cope with this aspect

of our predicament. In infancy we learn to love human faces whose

features will eventually be blended in the face that emerges in the mirror

as we reach adulthood. We grow into a body akin to the bodies from

which we came, while growing into a personality akin to the ones that

animate those other bodies. We thus repeatedly have the sense of

becoming our own parents, a common form of intergenerational déjà vu.

Those who do not know their parents can only wonder who they are

becoming. Hence they can only wonder, How did someone like me come

to be living in a body like this?

Some people say that they have nothing in common with their parents

and siblings. I think that they are speaking ﬁguratively; or maybe they are

just in denial. Almost all of us look and sound and feel and move and

think like the people from whom we came: a genuine sport of nature is

very rare. What is more likely is that a person’s similarities to his relatives

lie in aspects of himself that don’t matter to him, or that he dislikes and

rejects. Not valuing commonalities is indeed a way of not having any-

thing in common, ﬁguratively speaking; it just isn’t a way of literally

having nothing in common.

Someone who doesn’t value what he has in common with his relatives

may think that he need never have known them in order to forge his

independent identity. I doubt it. This person is likely to have deﬁned

himself as different from his relatives precisely because they exempliﬁed

aspects of himself that he would otherwise have been unable to discern

clearly enough to disdain. Learning not to be like his relatives has still

involved learning from them: if he had never known them, he might well

have ended up more like them.

The point is that biological origins needn’t be worth embracing in

order to be worth knowing. Someone who doesn’t know his relatives

cannot even turn up his nose at them. The question for him is not “Shall

I follow my progenitors?” but “Am I following them?” and to this latter

question he can never know the answer. He can have neither the

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

satisfaction of continuing in their footsteps nor that of striking out on his

own, because their footsteps have been effaced.

Even if a child never knows its biological parents, they usually remain

signiﬁcant ﬁgures in its life, ﬁgures to whom it is likely to develop an

attachment. That’s why roughly half of adopted children search for their

biological families at some point,

and it is why the children

of donor conception are now starting to search for their families as well.

In my view, the tendency to become attached to unknown parents bears

on whether parental obligations are transferable, a question to which

I now turn.

Why do these children search for absent parents who can no longer

rear them and are unlikely to form a signiﬁcant relationship with them?

Having reached adulthood, haven’t they ﬁnally made these parents

redundant? Apparently not, although we can only speculate why. Here

are my speculations.

. A recent literature review concludes: “Following conservative estimates of more

recent studies in countries with open records policies, about % of all adopted persons

will, at some point in their life, search for their birth parents” (Ulrich Müller and Barbara

Perry, “Adopted Persons’ Search for and Contact With Their Birth Parents I: Who Searches

and Why?” Adoption Quarterly  (): –, at p. ). These numbers have recently

been increasing (p. ), perhaps in response to greater awareness and acceptance of

such searches.

. See, for example, the Donor Sibling Registry (http://www.donorsiblingregistry

.com/); the Donor Offspring/Parents Registry and Search Page (http://www.amfor.net/

DonorOffspring/); the “Donor Offspring” page of the Donor Conception Support Group

of Australia (http://www.dcsg.org.au/); the UK Voluntary Information Exchange and

Contact Register (http://www.ukdonorlink.org.uk); and New Zealand’s Human Assisted

Reproductive Technology (HART) Register (http://www.dia.govt.nz/pubforms.nsf/URL/

HARTbrochure.pdf/$ﬁle/HARTbrochure.pdf). A series by David Plotz in the online maga-

zine Slate resulted in many inquiries from donor offspring seeking their biological families

(http://slate.msn.com/id//); Plotz discusses these inquiries, and many other aspects

of donor conception, in The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm

Bank (New York: Random House, ). See also an op-ed entitled “Give Me My Own

History” by David Gollancz (The Guardian, May , , http://www.guardian.co.uk/

comment/story/,,,.html); and a series of slides from the Oprah Winfrey Show

(http://www.oprah.com/relationships/slide//rel__.jhtml).

On the similarities between donor conception and adoption, see Eric Blyth, Marilyn

Crawshaw, Jean Haase, and Jennifer Speirs, “The Implications of Adoption for Donor

Offpsring Following Donor-Assisted Conception,” Child and Family Social Work 

(): –.

 Persons in Prospect

Humans are unlike other creatures in being at risk for feeling un-

moored. We have both an egocentric conception of the world and an

objective conception of a creature whose conception it is, a creature who

is identical with the “I” at the center of that egocentric conception. Seeing

the world from within our own point of view and also from without makes

us susceptible to a sense of alienation. Unless we can reconcile these two

conceptions of ourselves, we may suffer what might be called existential

insecurity—an insecure sense of our own concrete reality.

The creature who I am is securely rooted in the objective order. It is

rooted in the objective order not only by being located in time and space

but also by its location in the web of causality. It didn’t just appear out of

nowhere: it is the result of causal antecedents that tie it to the rest of

spatiotemporal existence. Of course, I am that creature, and so I didn’t

just appear out of nowhere, either: I came from the same origins. Yet in

order to feel that its connections to the rest of reality are mine, I must

ﬁnd a way of translating them into my egocentric perspective—a way of

seeing them from my point of view.

The challenge, in other words, is to identify subjectively with the

objective reality of the creature who I am, by seeing how that creature’s

place in reality can possibly be mine. In order to make that identiﬁcation,

I must see how the connections anchoring that creature in the objective

order can have, from my personal point of view, the subjective signiﬁ-

cance of connections.

But of course, the “I” of my egocentric perspective is a person, for

whom connections are most real when they are personal connections,

consisting in felt attachments. The way to identify subjectively with the

creature who I am objectively is to see its place in the objective world as

my place in a personal world. Personal attachments to my causal origins,

in the form of my biological parents and ancestors, enable me to expe-

rience ﬁrsthand the objective reality of the creature who I am. If I lack

such subjective correlates for the connections anchoring that creature in

objective reality, I am existentially insecure, because I am unable to see

from my perspective how its place in reality is mine. That’s why people

who don’t know their origins speak of feeling adrift in the cosmos, out of

place in the world.

This sense of rootlessness is especially acute in light of elementary

knowledge about the realm of living things. That realm is structured by

the life-function of self-replication, which locates every living thing in a

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

chain of progenitors and progeny. To be a living thing is to be a link in

that chain. Not to experience oneself as located in that chain is to lack a

sense of one’s membership in the realm of life, which is the locus of one’s

membership in reality.

Most people feel a need for a connection to that realm. It can be

expressed as a need for roots, for a home—for a family. It is manifested in

religious creation stories and cosmologies, in the perpetuation of

traditions, and in the ceremonies surrounding ancestors and memorials.

The same need naturally leads children to seek an attachment to their

biological parents. And it is another peculiarity of human beings to

be capable of becoming attached even to ﬁgures with whom they

are not acquainted.

Many animals become attached to members of their family or group,

and they appear to experience grief when these attachments are severed.

But they become attached only to others with whom they are acquainted

and whom they can recognize by sight or sound or smell. Humans, too,

become attached to one another by acquaintance, of course; but they

have the unique capacity for attachment to others whom they have never

met and wouldn’t recognize.

Those who study and counsel adoptees believe that they feel the loss

of the birth parents they never knew, and that their sense of loss is

comparable to that of children who experience parental death or

divorce.

How can a child experience the loss of parents with whom it

has had no relationship to begin with? The answer is that a child is

capable of forming attachments to absent ﬁgures, provided that they are

present to its thoughts as real objects.

Typically, an object is ﬁrst presented in thought when it is perceived,

whereupon a mental ﬁle may be opened to store information received

from it via perception.

Such a ﬁle is used for thinking about the thing

. See David M. Brodzinsky, “A Stress and Coping Model of Adoption Adjustment,” in

The Psychology of Adoption, ed. David M. Brodzinsky and Marshall D. Schechter (New York:

Oxford University Press, ); Steven L. Nickman, “Retroactive Loss in Adopted Persons,”

in Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, ed. Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman,

and Steven L. Nickman (Washington, D.C.: Taylor and Francis, ), pp. –.

. See Robin Jeshion, “Acquaintanceless De Re Belief,” in Meaning and Truth: Inves-

tigations in Philosophical Semantics, ed. Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and

David Shier (New York: Seven Bridges Press, ), pp. –. I am grateful to Jeshion for

suggesting this way of expressing what was a vague intuition on my part.

 Persons in Prospect

directly, in a way that is not mediated by a description or a concept.

One does not merely have an existentially quantiﬁed belief to the effect

that something satisﬁes various predicates; one does not merely have

various beliefs whose subject-terms pick out the same thing under

various descriptions; one has a mental ﬁle that stands for the thing and

collects predicates descriptive of it, much as the thing itself uniﬁes a

bundle of properties.

Though a mental ﬁle is typically connected to its object by a channel

of perceptual information, it can also stand for an object without such a

connection.

If a creature can have intentions with respect to its own

mental representations, then it can open and maintain a ﬁle intended to

stand for a single thing. It must somehow pick out what the ﬁle is to stand

for, but thereafter it can use the ﬁle to treat the thing as an immediate

object of thought.

Of course, there is no point in opening a mental ﬁle for something that

probably doesn’t exist or cannot be picked out as its intended referent.

But no such risks can deter a child from opening mental ﬁles for a bio-

logical mother or father with whom it is unacquainted. Every child can

be certain of having one and only one such mother and father, to whom

it can refer as “my mother” and “my father,” and for whom it can there-

fore open ﬁles in the assurance of their standing for unique individuals.

The child can ﬁll these ﬁles with speculations about its parents, and it

can become attached to those parents by thinking about them in this

distinctively objectual way.

These considerations about the need and the capacity for attachment to

biological parents are what lead me to think that parental obligations are

nontransferable. The obligations are nontransferable, I think, because

they arise in the context of a personal relationship.

Let us consider the daughter of a sperm donor, so that we can rely on

pronomial gender to keep the parties straight. If the mother is like other

recipients of donated sperm, she may insist that the girl has no use for

her biological father, because he is “nobody to her.” This statement is

demonstrably false. The daughter may be nobody to him, because he can

think of her only under the description “my possible children,” never

. Again, see Jeshion, “Acquaintanceless De Re Belief.”

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

knowing whether he is referring to anyone at all. But to her he is a real

person, locatable in thought, no matter how elusive he may be in time

and space. Like every human child, she knows that with the word

‘father’, she can reach down a causal chain to address a single other

human who is partly responsible for her existence.

In trying to cope with the predicament entailed by her existence, the

daughter can want to be helped, not just by some paternal ﬁgure or

other, but by the particular father who introduced her into that predica-

ment; who links her to humanity, the realm of life, the causal order; who

is her prototype and precursor in personal development; and who could

give her a hint of how psyche and soma might be reconciled in her case.

Out of those needs, the child can establish a mental representation

capable of sustaining an emotional attachment to her father, and she can

then frame a demand addressed directly to him, whether or not she

knows his earthly address. So personal a demand, so obviously justiﬁed,

deserves to be answered in person.

I know that my view seems grossly unenlightened. What passes for

enlightenment today, however, strikes me as the mirror image of the

purported enlightenment of the eugenics movement a century ago. Back

then, the people who claimed to know better than common sense

believed that a person’s biological heritage was all-important; today they

believe that it is utterly insigniﬁcant. Neither belief is true; either belief

can lead to a wholesale violation of rights. The rights violated in the

present case are the rights of children.

One objection to arguments like mine is that they seem to cast asper-

sions on donor-conceived children, by implying that they should never

have been born. I do not think that my arguments yield that implication

in a form that should give offense; in Part III of this series, I explain why.

Another objection is that the children of donor conception are likely to

waive any claims they may have on their biological parents. I deal with

this objection in Part III as well.

A ﬁnal objection to my arguments is that donor-conceived offspring

have received the gift of life, which they wouldn’t have received without

the help of a sperm or egg donor. But I have argued that life is not

a gratuitous beneﬁt but a predicament with which the recipients require

a kind of assistance that they will justiﬁably call on their biological

parents to provide.

 Persons in Prospect

Note, moreover, that an obligation undertaken in bad faith cannot be

excused by the fact that the party to whom it is owed was better off for its

having been undertaken. If my promise to assist you with a risky project

gives you the necessary conﬁdence to begin it, then I am still obligated to

assist you even if, in retrospect, my defaulting on the promise would not

cause you to regret having begun. And if I know in advance that I am

going to default on my promise, then I cannot justify issuing it on the

grounds that it will induce you to begin a project that you will subse-

quently be glad to have begun, despite my expected default.

In this last example, my behavior is somewhat analogous to that of a

sperm donor, only not quite as bad. The sperm donor doesn’t induce his

offspring voluntarily to enter the predicament of human life, on the

grounds that they will be glad to have entered it; and he doesn’t just

expect to have all-things-considered reason to default on those obliga-

tions. The sperm donor throws his offspring into the human predica-

ment willy-nilly, on the basis of a positive intention to default on the

obligations that he thereby undertakes, since he wouldn’t have under-

taken them, in the ﬁrst place, if he hadn’t planned to default on them. I

don’t think that he is morally entitled to bank on his children’s forgive-

ness in this way, even if they do eventually forgive him.

iii. love and nonexistence

The birth of a child can move us to value judgments that seem inconsis-

tent. Consider, for example, a fourteen-year-old girl who decides to have

This part was presented to the graduate student colloquium at NYU (February ); at

The Fourth Steven Humphrey Excellence in Philosophy Conference at the University of

California, Santa Barbara (February ), where the commentator was Mark Schroeder; to

an ethics conference at Northwestern University (May ), where the commentator was

Richard Kraut; to a seminar on the ethical signiﬁcance of the emotions at the Centre for the

Study of Mind in Nature (Oslo, June ); and to the philosophy department at the

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For comments and suggestions, I am grateful to

the participants in these events and to Paul Boghossian, Caspar Hare, Robin Jeshion, Nishi

Shah, and Sharon Street.

This part bears some similarity to Larry Temkin’s “Intransitivity and the Mere Addition

Paradox,” Philosophy & Public Affairs  (): –. Both seek to show that a combina-

tion of views about future persons is not as paradoxical as it seems. The difference between

the papers is this. Temkin focuses on failures of transitivity among comparative judgments;

I address a different problem, in which the value of a general state of affairs appears

inconsistent with the values of all possible instances. I am unsure whether the metaethical

solution that I propose for the latter problem is called for by the former.

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

a baby.

We think that the birth of a child to a fourteen-year-old mother

will be unfortunate, even tragic, and hence that she should not decide to

have one. But after the birth, we are loath to say that the child should not

have been born. Indeed, we now think that the birth is something to

celebrate—once a year, on the child’s birthday.

We may be tempted to say that we have simply changed our minds

in light of better information. Before the birth, we didn’t know how

things would turn out, and now we know more. But the birth did not

bring to light any previously unknown information relevant to our

judgments.

Or, at least, I mean to restrict my attention to cases in

which it didn’t. There may be cases in which we feared speciﬁc calami-

ties, such as a birth defect or a descent into juvenile delinquency; and

then if such possibilities don’t materialize, we change our minds. I am

not speaking of such cases; I am speaking of cases in which we

disapproved of the girl’s decision for reasons that are not falsiﬁed by

subsequent developments, and yet we are subsequently glad about the

birth. The child is raised under serious disadvantages of the very sort

that we anticipated, but the severely disadvantaged child is still a child

to be cherished.

We knew in advance how we would feel. Even as we deplored the girl’s

decision, we knew that we would welcome the child. We may even have

cited this prospect to ourselves as a reason for softening our opinion:

“Don’t condemn her for deciding to have a child.” We might have said:

The paper also overlaps in important respects with Caspar Hare’s “Voices From Another

World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist?” Ethics

 (): –. In the last section of that paper, Hare discusses the difference between

de re and de dicto concern for persons, which is more or less the same difference that I

discuss here.

Finally, Jeff McMahan discusses many of the same issues in “Preventing the Existence of

People With Disabilities,” in Quality of Life and Human Difference: Genetic Testing, Health

Care, and Disability, ed. David Wasserman, Jerome Bickenbach, and Robert Wachbroit

(New York: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. My approach to these issues is

similar to McMahan’s in some respects and different in others. The closest similarity is to

remarks that he makes about “attachments” on pp. ff. The greatest difference is that

McMahan analyzes cases of this kind as involving changes of evaluative judgment, whereas

I analyze them as involving pairs of judgments that seem inconsistent only if understood in

mistakenly realist terms.

. This case is discussed by Derek Parﬁt in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, ), chap. .

. McMahan makes the same point, on p. .

 Persons in Prospect

“Once it is born, you’ll be delighted.” But such arguments could not

dispel our sense that something was wrong.

One might think that these judgments can be reconciled, after all,

because their objects are not the same. When we think that the girl

should not have a baby, the object of our judgment is a quantiﬁed propo-

sition, about her having some baby or other, whereas it is the birth of a

particular baby that we will celebrate. And of course we can consistently

think that her having a baby is unfortunate in general but not in the case

of her having some particular one, since the general rule afﬁrmed by our

ﬁrst judgment may allow for an exception noted by the second.

Yet the attempted reconciliation appears to be blocked by the fact,

which was known to us in advance, that any baby she had would be

welcomed. How can we judge that a fourteen-year-old’s having a baby

would be unfortunate as a rule, if we also judge that any particular

instance of the rule would be an exception?

I do not think that we actually change our minds after the birth of

this child, if a change of mind would entail giving up our antecedent

judgment. We still think that the girl should not have had a baby,

delighted though we are with the baby she has had. That one judgment

predominated beforehand and the other afterwards should not be

allowed to obscure the fact that we are of two minds about the case.

One might hope to dispel the appearance of inconsistency by claim-

ing that the former is a prima facie judgment, deploring any birth only

insofar as the mother was underage and thus leaving open the possibility

of mitigating circumstances. But we don’t just think that the girl should

not have had a baby insofar as she is underage; we think that she should

not have had a baby all things considered; and yet we are glad about the

birth of this baby all things considered as well.

The mother herself may regret her decision. She may wish that she

hadn’t had a baby, may believe that she shouldn’t have had one. But of

course she still loves the baby and is thankful that it was born. As in our

case, her judgments persist in light of one another. That is, she regrets

having had a baby when she did even though it was this baby; and she is

thankful for this baby even though she had it when she did.

This conundrum is one of several that Derek Parﬁt considers in Part IV

of Reasons and Persons, the Part devoted to “Future Generations.” I want

to suggest a solution that Parﬁt doesn’t consider. Parﬁt’s entire

 Philosophy & Public Affairs

discussion presupposes that our value judgments must be consistent as

descriptions of the things they evaluate: they must be satisﬁable by some

distribution of positive and negative value across the possibilities. I think

that the present case gives us reason to reject this assumption.

How could it be rational to have such different attitudes toward one and

the same event? The answer lies in the different modes of presentation

under which the event is viewed.

Our unfavorable judgment is about the baby under a description.

What makes this judgment tenable despite our countervailing judgment

is not, as we initially suspected, that it is general rather than singular.

We think not only that the girl should not have had a baby at fourteen but

that she should not have had the baby she had at fourteen, thus con-

sidered under a deﬁnite description that picks it out uniquely. The

reason why these judgments withstand our favorable judgment about

the baby is that, whereas they rely on descriptions, the favorable judg-

ment is about the baby considered demonstratively, as “this baby,”

“him,” or “her.”

Why does it matter whether we can make judgments about the baby

considered demonstratively? The reason is that such judgments are

guided by emotions that depend on acquaintance-based thought. One

such emotion is love.

In the context of its mother’s love, the child is

presented to her mind as it is known to her directly via sight and touch.

She does not love it under descriptions of the form “such-and-such a

child” or “the so-and-so” or even as “Fred” or “Sue.” The latter modes of

presentation would have been available to her even if she had merely

heard the child described or referred to by name, in which case she

would be in no position to love it. Unlike those modes of presentation,

acquaintance-based thought is a way of being mentally in touch or en

rapport with an object; and the rapport it entails is prerequisite to the

emotion of love.

. On the role of perception in love, see my “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics  ():

–, reprinted in Self to Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –;

and “Beyond Price,” Ethics  (): –.

. Thus, an expectant mother who says that she already loves her future child may not

be speaking the truth, in philosophical strictness. She may be imagining how she will love

the child, mentally simulating what it will be like to love the child, or having fantasies of

loving it. But until she becomes acquainted with it, her emotion cannot be love.

 Persons in Prospect

Our mental relation to something can determine which attitudes

toward it are rational. Before we are acquainted with a baby, we can

approve or disapprove of it, but loving it is quite impossible, in my view,

and hence not rational, either; whereas loving a baby after being

acquainted with it is the easiest thing in the world; rational, too.

The different responses that are rational to have toward the baby, as

we think of it under different modes of presentation, account for our

different value judgments about its birth. We should feel free to experi-

ence these responses and hold the corresponding judgments, because

value is the shadow of such attitudes, not an independent standard of

their correctness. If the attitudes make sense, then the fact that they cast

conﬂicting shadows cannot undermine their authority. And they make

sense, despite the conﬂict between their shadows, because their inten-

tional objects are different in ways that rationally affect the emotions

informing our judgments.

When does a prospective mother become acquainted with her child? I would say that she

becomes acquainted with it when she ﬁrst perceives it. And when does she ﬁrst perceive

her child? I would say that she perceives the child at the point traditionally called quick-

ening, when the fetus begins to make movements that she can feel. Thus, the tradition that

interpreted quickening to be a morally relevant threshold was not just a superstition, in my

view; it drew what may indeed be a morally relevant distinction.

. This dissolution of the problem would be unnecessary if our emotions led us to

judgments positing distinct and incomparable values. If we judged merely that the girl’s

initial decision was imprudent, whereas the baby is beautiful, then we could interpret our

judgments as descriptions satisﬁable in the one and only actual world, on the grounds that

beauty has nothing to do with prudence. Pluralism about values could thus spare us from

resorting to antirealism.

But I am imagining us as drawing—as I think we do draw—all-things-considered con-

clusions about whether a baby, or this baby, should have been brought into existence. And

I am imagining that, whereas we still think that the girl shouldn’t have had the baby she did,

Persons in Prospect

Abstract