| Description |
In the thesis I motivate, explain, and apply a new broadly consequentialist and utilitarian ethical framework: counterfactual utilitarianism. In contrast to other utilitarian frameworks which might calculate cumulative or average overall utility, counterfactual utilitarianism aims to reapply focus on the well-being of individual sentient beings. At its core, it prescribes that we evaluate the morality of a given action by comparing the possible states of affairs (or counterfactuals) that would result of said action were taken or not, and that we assess the moral difference between these possible outcomes based on the difference in well-being between sentient individuals in one counterfactual and the corresponding individuals in the other. One way this framework occasionally produces important moral conclusions distinct from those of other, more traditional forms of utilitarianism is by revealing that comparisons between existence and nonexistence are ethically incoherent. It also suggests that the morally relevant sense of personal identity is one which is intimately connected to sentient experience, instead of alternatives such as genidentical or genetic essentialist notions of identity. This upshot of counterfactual utilitarianism has significant implications for bioethics, which I demonstrate by applying it to 1) the debate surrounding the ethics of embryo selection as compared to gene editing, and 2) the non-identity problem. |
