Prioritarianism, Population Ethics, and Competing Claims

Abstract

In his restriction of prioritarianism to cases in which the same people would exist in all the possible outcomes, Parfit stakes out an unstable position, both for himself and more generally. There is no plausible rationale for a prioritarianism that is so restricted, which is consistent with the key features of Parfit’s elaboration and defence of this view and his other commitments. The principles that might be appealed to, in an attempt to justify such a restriction, give rise to a different view—one that is sensitive to the presence or absence of the competing claims of different individuals, where both the existence and the magnitude of these claims are determined by gains and losses to individuals in a manner that is not fully captured by Parfit’s prioritarian weighting.