On the lives not worth starting: a defence of the veil argument against the non-identity problem

Abstract

The non-identity problem is a problem about the actions that simultaneously bring people into existence and bestowing upon them lives that are inevitably flawed. Do we wrong a person by bringing her into existence when the alternative is that a different, non-identical person would’ve existed? The “veil argument” is one attempt in addressing the problem. Specifically, it’s an argument that we may wrong future people by treating them unfairly. The argument borrows ideas from contractarianism and proposes just procreative principles which, when violated, justifies why conceiving individuals who are severely disadvantaged is morally wrong. In this essay, I defend this argument by making two important claims. First, we may and should consider the interests of merely possible people if we have reasons to believe and act as if they would exist, even though they might not in fact exist. Second, there’s a distinction between “lives worth living” and “lives worth starting.” The threshold for the former is significant lower than the latter. Together, they aid in refining the veil argument in generating just procreative principles.