Solving the non-identity problem with conditional obligations

Daniel Cohen (Charles Sturt University)

Many of us have the intuition that we are obligated, when all else is equal, to create the happier of two non-identical people, if forced to choose between these options. In this paper, I give an account of the difficulties involved in justifying this intuition. The ‘non-identity problem’ is the problem of finding such a justification. Ultimately, I argue that an adequate solution must appeal to conditional obligations. While making sense of conditional obligations itself presents theoretical difficulties, I offer a tentative account sufficient for the purposes of solving the non-identity problem.