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The Biggest Unsolved Problem of Philosophy in 100 Years

Alex O'Connor | October 12, 2026



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– VIDEO NOTES

The non-identity problem was first described by Derek Parfit in the 1980s. Can you solve it?

– LINKS

Read Parfit’s chapter on the problem online: https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Parfit1.pdf

– TIMESTAMPS

0:00 A Mother’s Choice
8:36 Real Life Cases
13:01 Just Choose the Better Outcome!
19:31 Conservation vs Depletion

– CONNECT

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Written by Alex O'Connor

Comments

This post currently has 25 comments.

  1. @Dunno751

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    No a deaf guy shouldn't be glad for their parents. Many people are alive simply because they don't have the balls to kill themselves, I know cuz that's me. It's not a blessing to be alive for many it's a curse. Never having existed isn't a bad thing. And I wish I'd have never existed and even if I didn't, if I had an amazing life despite my parents being unfit, never having existed wouldn't affect how I feel cuz I wouldn't have felt anything

  2. @strange_man_upstairs

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    These seem to only pose a problem for consequentialists. It's wrong for the mother to choose to have the disabled child because her intention is to gain attention rather than to love her child. In the IVF case, deafness is a material evil, so all other things being equal, it makes the most sense to choose a non-deaf child. The decision to pick the deaf embryo over the hearing one seems to be out of selfishness rather than love.
    If I were in the situation where I had to pick among several IVF embryos (although I don't think IVF is morally permissible anyways), I would pick the most beautiful, most healthy, most intelligent, etc. one bc beauty, health, and intelligence are goods. If, then, I have an equal moral responsibility for each embryo, I would simply pick the one that is materially the best. I believe it's due to this simple intuition that we are naturally baffled that anybody would intentionally choose a disabled child in the IVF case, even though we may know, love, and appreciate disabled people in general.

  3. @100percentSNAFU

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    My wife and I did IVF. I am someone who thinks about all these kind of existential questions. So when the results came back, they had 4 viable options out of the whole lot, all with roughly equal chance to successfully go to term. We ideally wanted 2 children, we did the first one, and it was successful, and our first child was born. Of course then came the question, what if the second one works what about the others? I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I were to have them discard them. At that moment we both agreed we would use them all and if we ended up with 4 children, that was what was meant to happen, although we did not desire to have 4. Ended up the second and third attempts rejected, and the fourth produced our second child. I sleep better knowing that we gave all 4 a shot, but I also think about had the second one been successful it would have absolutely been a moral conundrum for me, versus what would be practical and affordable, kind of like the example of the lesser number having a higher quality of life or the larger number getting the opportunity to exist but having a lower quality as of course more sacrifices would have had to have been made by everyone to accommodate more mouths to feed.

  4. @colesnapp9124

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    I think a mistake people are making when they say "I would rather exist than not exist" or "existing is worse than non-existence" or "I don't want to not have existed" is they are looking at their life from the outside perspective of non-existence as if they are existing in that non-existence. This is natural and intuitive to think yet false because we can't actually conceive not existing. I believe the correct way of viewing all human life, including our own, is to assume any life can be substituted for another. From this perspective, choosing someone with a disability to be born is the SAME and disabling someone who would have been born without the disability. Also, policy "A" is the better one because it doesn't matter that people of policy "B" will never be born, what matters is that the policy "A" world is a better one for the people in it.

  5. @lenadiveeva586

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    So stupid example. Women who loves attention and disability of kid. This is tragic for parent and constant work. I hate this unrealistic picture of vain woman. Just shows how all philosophers are acting in one misogynistic narrative more then 3 thousands years

  6. @ALavin-en1kr

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    What is time in a different dimension? We only know what it is in this dimension as we evolve with the Precession of the Equinoxes through different ages; a descent into a dark age of materialism and an assent upwards or inwards to a higher age with inroads made into heaven with the discoveries and uses of finer forces, electrifies etc. all the way to electro magnetism and even to magnetism itself, which will likely be the case two millennia from now.

  7. @ALavin-en1kr

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    This is a materialist way of looking at it. As a soul; a spark of divine consciousness, we have existed since the first spark from the whole flew apart. I cannot imagine any mother who would want a disabled child for attention unless she had a serious psychological condition. This was actually the case with a medicine for insomnia during pregnancy those who took a pill for it and it caused congenital anomalies in the child, which was inadvertently caused. The reality likely is that there is completion to be born as souls want to work out their karma, in a physical form.

  8. @johnvanort3389

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    The society and world that has to provide for the disabled child has been wronged and the self seeking woman has been wronged by allowing herself self gratitude, that benifits nobody even herself.

  9. @JOzonne

    October 12, 2026 at 2:11 am

    My twins were conceived via IVF. We did choose to not implant any embryos with chromosomal issues. I do think about it but why would I choose to have a kid with a disability if we had the choice.

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