Jens Johansson

In a discussion of Parfit's Drops of Water case, Zach Barnett has recently proposed a novel argument against “No Small Improvement”; that is, the claim that a single drop of water cannot affect the magnitude of a thirsty person's suffering. We first show that Barnett's argument can be significantly strengthened, and also that the fundamental idea behind it yields a straightforward argument for the transitivity of equal suffering. We then suggest that defenders of No Small Improvement could reject a Pareto principle that is presupposed in Barnett's argument and our developments of it. However, this does not save No Small Improvement, since there is a convincing argument against this claim that does not presuppose the Pareto principle.

John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have argued that a person’s death is, in many cases, bad for him, whereas a person’s prenatal non-existence is not bad for him. Their suggestion relies on the idea that death deprives the person of pleasant experiences that it is rational for him to care about, whereas prenatal non-existence only deprives him of pleasant experiences that it is not rational for him to care about. In two recent articles in The Journal of Ethics, I have objected that it is irrelevant what it is in fact rational for the person to care about. Fischer and Brueckner have replied to my critique. In this paper I respond to their latest pair of replies

In a typical non-identity case, the agent performs an action that causes someone to exist at a low but positive level of well-being, although an alternative was to create another, much happier person instead. There seem to be strong moral reasons against what the agent does, but it is difficult to explain how this can be so. In particular, it seems that on a simple counterfactual account of harm, the action does not harm anyone, as it does not make anyone worse off than he or she would have been had the action not been performed. In this paper, I criticize the response that the action nevertheless harms the actual child, as well as the response that it makes the counterfactual child worse off. I argue that the following alternative view deserves attention: a compound of the actual and the counterfactual child is made worse off by the action.

The counterfactual comparative account of harm (cca) faces well-known problems concerning preemption and omission. In a recent article in this journal, Daniel Immerman proposes a novel variant of cca, which he calls the worse than nothing account (wtna). According to Immerman, wtna nicely handles the preemption and omission problems. We seek to show, however, that wtna is not an acceptable account of harm. In particular, while wtna deals better than cca with some cases that involve preemption and omission, it has implausible implications in other similar cases – cases that, moreover, pose no problems for cca.

In a typical non-identity case, the agent performs an action that causes someone to exist at a low but positive level of well-being, although an alternative was to create another, much happier person instead. There seem to be strong moral reasons against what the agent does, but it is difficult to explain how this can be so. In particular, it seems that on a simple counterfactual account of harm, the action does not harm anyone, as it does not make anyone worse off than he or she would have been had the action not been performed. In this paper, I criticize the response that the action nevertheless harms the actual child, as well as the response that it makes the counterfactual child worse off. I argue that the following alternative view deserves attention: a compound of the actual and the counterfactual child is made worse off by the action.

In defense of the Deprivation Approach to the badness of death against the Lucretian objection that death is relevantly similar to prenatal nonexistence, John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have suggested that whereas death deprives us of things that it is rational for us to care about, prenatal nonexistence does not. I have argued that this suggestion, even if correct, does not make for a successful defense of the Deprivation Approach against the Lucretian objection. My criticism involved a thought experiment in which a person avoids being tortured. Recently, Taylor Cyr has defended Fischer and Brueckner’s approach, arguing that my thought experiment is incoherent. In this response, I question both the truth and relevance of Cyr’s incoherence claim.

In a recent article in this journal, Eli Pitcovski puts forward a novel, explanation-based account of harm. We seek to show that Pitcovski’s account, and his arguments in favor of it, can be substantially improved. However, we also argue that, even thus improved, the account faces a dilemma. The dilemma concerns the question of what it takes for an event, E, to explain why a state, P, does not obtain. Does this require that P would have obtained if E had not occurred? Pitcovski’s theory faces problems no matter how one answers that question.

Just as some illnesses and injuries are worse than others, so some deaths appear to be worse than others. This is so not only for the fairly trivial reason that those deaths that are bad are worse than those deaths that are not bad: less trivially, some bad deaths seem to be worse than other bad deaths. For instance, whereas it may well be bad for an eighty-year-old to die, it is likely to be even worse for a forty-year-old, and still worse for a twenty-year-old. Supposing that the badness of death does indeed vary in this way, what factor or factors does it vary *with*? The example just given indicates that age is one such factor: in particular, the earlier one’s death occurs, the worse it is. For a number of reasons, however, things are more complicated—though not quite as complicated as some philosophers have suggested.