On Parfit’s Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle

In the posthumously published ‘Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles’, Derek Parfit presents a novel axiological principle which he calls the Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle and claims that it does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion. This paper shows that even the best version of Parfit's principle cannot avoid this conclusion. That said, accepting such a principle makes embracing the Repugnant Conclusion more justifiable. This paper further addresses important questions which Parfit left unanswered concerning: the relative importance of individual and collective goodness, comparisons involving unequal outcomes, how to understand individual goodness, and whether incomparability at the level of individual goodness implies incomparability at the level of overall goodness.