PHIL690 SP25
Seminar in Special Topics (PHIL690)
Topic: Personal Identity and Population Ethics
Dr. Cory Wright
Tuesdays · 5:30pm–8:15pm · LA1–204
This course is a reading of Parfit’s (1984) Reasons and Persons. Our primary topics will be personal identity and population ethics. Hence, we shall discuss two kinds of interrelated questions. The first kind will be applied metaphysical questions about personhood—that is, questions about sameness, difference, identity, change, nature, location, etc. For example, what are you, and where are you located? Are there criteria to determine whether someone is one-and-the-same person over time? Is every human a person? More generally, if something is a person, what properties will it have; and if something has those properties, will it be a person? The second kind will be ethical questions about ourselves and about future people. For example, is it rational to act against our own best interests? Do we owe anything to future generations? Is it better if more people live longer lives? Should we prefer a much larger population of people that would be better off overall despite each member leading a life that is barely worth living? There will be no expert in the room, and there is no guarantee that we will be much wiser at the end of the course; mostly, we will just be 16 weeks closer to death ourselves. But it won’t have been boring, will have been meaningful, and we will at least have read one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century.