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Climate change and the Non-Identity Problem in Derek Parfit's work
Svěrák, Vojtěch ; Jirsa, Jakub (advisor) ; Hříbek, Tomáš (referee)
The aim of my project is to reconstruct Derek Parfit's examination of the Non-Identity Problem (NIP) with special emphasis on the example of climate change understood as a version of NIP. In the first part, I establish the connection between climate change and NIP. Then, I show how and why Parfit fails to find a solution to NIP in his book Reasons and Persons (RP). Furthermore, I describe the rejected suggestion from RP that is developed in Parfit's unfinished article Future People, the Non- Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles (FP). In the third section, I argue that Parfit's indicated answer to NIP from FP, so-called Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle (WDP), can avoid paradoxes and implausible conclusions that the impersonal approach and other versions of the person- affecting view could not if explicated and supported by other related concepts, such as the Imprecise Lexical View (ILW) or existential non-comparative benefits. Moreover, specified WDP provides innovative tools to justify moral intuition, threatened by NIP, that structural decisions that significantly contribute to climate change are wrong because they lower the collective and individual benefits of future people. In addition, they create a lexically worse world.
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Bernard Williams: Removal of Slave Morality
Svěrák, Vojtěch ; Jirsa, Jakub (advisor) ; Hill, James (referee)
Bernard Williams often faces critique that although he does persuasive deconstruction of ethical systems, there is no alternative to them in his work. He responds to those objections claiming that by removing ethical theories he made room which should stay empty. The question of my paper is whether his thesis is justifiable considering the approach of the Institution of Morality, which dominates ethical discourse in anglophone philosophy for the last decades and is according to Williams fundamentally wrong. I will start with the introduction to the context in which Williams makes a change of approach to ethics. Afterward, I will analyze human agency in terms of internal and external reasons. Then, I will compare the concepts of moral obligation and practical necessity, moreover, I will describe the notion of moral luck. Those points are roots for introducing the deficiency of the Institution of Morality and exploring the status of moral reasons. The implication of this deficiency is a reassessment of ethics as a discipline. This reassessment leads to some positive consequences, which will be alluded at the end of my paper by three hypotheses.
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