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Counterfactuals and Two Kinds of Ought
Daniel Dohrn
I discuss Caspar Hare’s solution to a new variant of Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem. Hare’s
solution rests on distinguishing two kinds of ought: The Ought of Omniscient Desire: what
you ought OD to do is what an omniscient, rational creature with appropriate interests would
want you to do. The Ought of Most Reason: what you ought MR to do is what there is most
reason to do. I argue that the distinction does not dissolve the problem. Moreover, I show
that Hare’s proposal to spell out his distinction in terms of an embedded counterfactual (if
you had not done what you did, then, if you had done what you did, what would the
consequence have been?) is flawed.
Derek Parfit’s notorious Non-Identity Problem still stirs debate. Recently, David Velleman
(2006) and Caspar Hare have given the problem an interesting new twist. I use an example of
Hare’s to illustrate the original problem (cf. Hare 2007: 499):
Mary knowingly causes her child to have heart conditions. For she ignores her doctor’s
advice and conceives a child while recovering from German Measles. She gives birth to
a child, John, who suffers from a life-long heart condition but leads a life otherwise
worth living.
Intuitively, Mary did something wrong. Had she waited, her child would in all probability
have been healthy. Yet she would not have conceived John but a person with a different
genome. John prefers living with a heart condition to not existing at all. So how could Mary
have done something wrong? What she did has benefited John.
1. The New Non-Identity Problem
Here is the new twist, assuming you are Mary:
A related, but distinct puzzle, which has received less attention, is to make sense of
your attitude, years later, towards John’s birth. Years later you have become very
attached to John. You are not faking it, when you celebrate his birthday. You are glad
that you ignored your doctor’s advice and brought John into the world. And so you
should be. Good parents have this attitude towards their children. And yet you
recognize that you ought not to have conceived John. How can this be? How can you
simultaneously be glad you did something, and recognize that you ought to be glad that
you did it, and recognize that you ought not to have done it? (Hare 2011: 202)
It is important to see the normative claim: it is not just morally permissible for Mary to be
glad that she conceived John, say because her feeling has no negative moral consequences.
Mary ought to be glad that she did conceive John. I prefer to state the point a bit differently:
from our independent viewpoint, Mary ought not to have conceived John. However, Mary
should adopt certain feelings towards John once he is born. In light of these feelings, she
should judge that she ought to have conceived John. The problem is how to reconcile this
intuition with the intuition that Mary ought not to have conceived John.