Topic > Derek Parfit's Overall Values, by David Benatar

A perfect example is when a potential parent goes for a visit to the doctor and the doctor says that if she were to get pregnant right now, the baby she would bring into the world would be severely autistic, and a child she would give birth to a year later would be healthy, then this difficult decision she makes constitutes an example of a conundrum of choices that would have enormous effects for the future. Parfit at this point cannot respond to the wrong action in the intuition of the non-identity case, because there is no one else who is not benefited and no one is harmed either. Benatar sees wrong in this intuition, because for him it finds the victim and in this case if the parent were to choose to give birth to a child, then this wrong action would bring harm to the child. The state of affairs in which we exist is wrong while the states of affairs in which we do not exist