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The Parfit Population Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Don Locke
Don Locke
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons is a long, difficult and fascinating book, inside which three shorter, clearer and better books are struggling to get out. The third of these shorter but better books deals with the problem of Future Generations, and that is the book I want to discuss. In it Parfit tries, but fails, to find a theory—Theory X, he calls it—which will deal with various problems and issues which he develops, and in particular the issue which I will call the Parfit Population Problem, the problem of how many people there ought to be. In this paper I offer not so much a theory as a suggestion as to what the solution(s) might be.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 240 , April 1987 , pp. 131 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 D., Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

2 T., Hurka, ‘Value and Population Size’, Ethics 93 (1983), 496–507.Google Scholar

3 M., Slote, ‘Satisficing Consequentialism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, LVIII (1984), 139–163.Google Scholar

4 J., Bennett, ‘On Maximising Happiness’, Obligations to Future Generations, R. I.Sikora and B. Barry (eds) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 61–73.Google Scholar

5 For some suggestions of a non-Utilitarian sort, see J., Bennett, op. cit.Google Scholar

6 This paper has benefited greatly from the comments of members of the Philosophy Departments, both staff and students, at the Universities of Warwick, Durham and East Anglia.