Marcin Nowicki
Jagiellonian University
The so-called non-identity problem posits a longstanding challenge to all authors engaged in the debate on intergenerational justice. Anyone interested in the duties owed to future generations has to explain how they address questions regarding this issue. And yet, there is surprisingly little dialogue between non-identity debates in intergenerational justice and in bioethics.
This paper aims to answer how various views on intergenerational justice (e.g. utilitarianism, leximin egalitarianism, sufficientarianism) relate to the views on non-identity in bioethics (e.g. Great-Difference, No-Difference, Two-Tier View). I will explain both approaches and analyse how they connect, i.e. whether certain views on justice require the adoption of a specific view on non-identity.
I want to reflect on that by introducing a distinction between vertical and horizontal comparisons. Vertical comparison requires the decision-maker to assess all available courses of action to declare one of them as the best for some persons – a classic example of such comparisons is those performed by a total utilitarian. Horizontal comparison, on the other hand, requires assessment of the course of action in question and comparing it to an independent standard, common to all courses of action. The best example of this approach is what Axel Gosseries calls a non-decline approach, which requires the current generation to transfer at least as many goods to the next as it received from the previous generation. I will then argue that conceptions of justice which rely on vertical comparisons are inextricably entwined with the non-identity problem. They require us to adopt some version of the No-Difference View and justify it in one way or another: e.g. redefining harm, employing the zipper argument or adopting an impersonal approach. Conceptions that use only horizontal comparisons seem to be much easier to separate from the non-identity problem and can, to some extent, accommodate views like Two-Tier or Great-Difference.
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SOPhiA 2026 