Abstract

Can an act harm someone—a future someone, someone who does not exist yet but will—if that person would never exist but for that very action? This is one question raised by the non-identity problem. Many would argue that the answer is No: an action harms someone only insofar as it is worse for her, and an action cannot be worse for someone if she would not exist without it. The first part of this paper contends that the plausibility of the ‘no harm’ argument stems from an equivocation. The second half argues for an account of harm that is both causal and contrastive. Finally, the paper contends that the contrastive account disarms the no harm argument and furthermore neutralizes a related argument that has been problematic for some previously proposed solutions to the non-identity problem