Analysis Of Robert Adams's Non-Identity Problem

Adams’s Non-Identity Problem

Introduction

In discussing whether God must create the best world that he can, Robert M. Adams raises the following hypothetical (Adams 1972, 326). Imagine a drug exists which is known to cause severe intellectual disability in any children conceived by a couple who takes it. If a couple desires to raise an intellectually disabled child, takes the drug, and conceives such a child, the challenge is to explain what, if anything, they have done wrong. The problem illustrated by this hypothetical is known as the “non-identity” problem (Benatar 2006, 114). The solution presented by Adams is that the parents have violated the following principle: “It is wrong for human beings to cause, knowingly and voluntarily, the procreation of an offspring of human parents which is notably deficient, by comparison with normal human beings, in mental or physical capacity” (Adams 1972, 330). After discussing whether someone is harmed by the parents’ action, this paper will build on the solution presented by Adams by suggesting two ways of understanding why the couple’s action was wrong – one utilitarian, and one virtue based.

Have the Parents Harmed Someone?

Adams offers two caveats that are important to properly

In the hypothetical discussed here, the objection might be to comparing the value of two human beings. However, in Adams’s hypothetical, these human beings do not yet exist. Therefore, what the parents are comparing are not so much individuals as qualities – like health and disability. Before an individual exists, it is permissible to weigh the quality of different types of lives against one another, for instance healthy lives against intellectually disabled ones. Because the individual does not yet exist, a utilitarian approach is permissible, even if one rejects that sort of comparison when comparing actual