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A solution to the problem is to adopt impersonal views, theories that don't rely on the notion of personal identity, such as utilitarianism. But impersonal views lead to what Parfit calls the " repugnant conclusion ", the idea that "For any perfectly equal population with very high positive welfare, there is a population with very low positive ...
The non-identity problem arises from the observation that actions taken today can fundamentally alter which future people come into existence. In chapter 16 of Reasons and Persons , Parfit posits that one's existence is intimately related to the time and conditions of one's conception.
In Hegel's words, "Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity." More recent metaphysicians have discussed trans-world identity—the notion that there can be the same object in different possible worlds. An alternative to trans-world identity is the counterpart relation in counterpart theory. It is a similarity relation that rejects ...
Reasons and Persons is a 1984 book by the philosopher Derek Parfit, in which the author discusses ethics, rationality and personal identity.. It is divided into four parts, dedicated to self-defeating theories, rationality and time, personal identity and responsibility toward future generations.
The mere addition paradox (also known as the repugnant conclusion) is a problem in ethics identified by Derek Parfit and discussed in his book Reasons and Persons (1984). The paradox identifies the mutual incompatibility of four intuitively compelling assertions about the relative value of populations.
A constant problem in mathematics, an indistinctness over whether an expression equals zero. Topics referred to by the same term This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Identity problem .
In many transcendence proofs, proving that n ≠ 0 is very difficult, and hence a lot of work has been done to develop methods that can be used to prove the non-vanishing of certain expressions. The sheer generality of the problem is what makes it difficult to prove general results or come up with general methods for attacking it.
For example, a non-identity finite group is simple if and only if it is isomorphic to all of its non-identity homomorphic images, [22] a finite group is perfect if and only if it has no normal subgroups of prime index, and a group is imperfect if and only if the derived subgroup is not supplemented by any proper normal subgroup.