We often think very carelessly about counterfactual personal identity, asking ourselves questions of doubtful intelligibility, such as, “What if I had been born in the Middle Ages?” It is very easy to fail to consider the objection, “But that would not have been the same person,” R. Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (Oxford 1987), 59.
A man breeds goldfish, thereby bringing about their existence. We do not normally think it is wrong, or even prima facie wrong, for a man to do this, even though he could equally well have brought about the existence of more excellent beings, more intelligent and capable of higher satisfactions. (He could have bred dogs or pigs, for example.), ibid. 60.
Suppose it has been discovered that if intending parents take a certain drug before conceiving a child, they will have a child whose abnormal genetic constitution will give it vastly superhuman intelligence and superior prospects of happiness. Other things being equal, would it be wrong for the intending parents to have normal children instead of taking the drug?…I do not think tha parents who chose to have normal children rather than take the drug would be doing anything wrong, ibid. 61.
Leibniz once wrote, “You will insist that you can complain, why didn’t God give you more strength [to resist temptation]. I answer: If He had done that, you would not be you, for He would not have produced you but another creature,” ibid. 65.
To those who are angry at God for not replacing Adam and Eve, after their fall, with better creatures, “so that the stain should not be transmitted to their posterity,” he [Leibniz] replies that:
“If God had thus removed sin, a very different series of things, very different combinations of circumstances and people and marriages, and very different people would have emerged, and hence if sin had been taken away or extinguished they themselves would not be in the world. And therefore they have no reason to be angry at Adam and Eve for sinning, much less at God for permitting the sin, since they ought rather to set their own existence to the credit of this very toleration of sins,” ibid. 66
Leibniz goes on to compare the complainers with someone of half-noble birth who is “angry with his father for marrying a lower-born wife, not thinking that another person would be in the wolrd instead of him if his father had married a different wife,” ibid. 66.
Leibniz is right about this. Even if I could have existed without some of the evils of the actual world (for example, those that will occur tomorrow), I could not have existed without past evils that have profoundly affected the course of human history, and especially the “combinations of…people and marriages.” We do not have to go all the way back to Adam and Eve to find evils that were necessary for our existence. If it had not been for the First World War, for example, my parents would probably never have met and married, and I would not have been born. A multiplicity of interacting chances, including evils great and small, affect which people mate, which gametes find each other, and which children come into being. The farther back we go in history, the larger the proportion of evils to which we owe our being; for the causal nexus relevant to our individual genesis widens as we go back in time. We almost certainly would never have existed had there not been just about the same evils as actually occurred in a large part of human history…by nature and historical situation human beings are subject to disease and death, exposed to earthquake and hurricane, and surrounded by potential enemies. Had it not been so, we would never have existed, ibid. 66-67.
It will be objected that even if evils were *causally* necessary for our existence, an *omnipotent* deity could have created us without them, and may have wrong us by not doing so. But I think that is wrong…God’s reasons for creating us individually are presumably bound up with his other plans for the world, which would have been different if he had prevented the evils in question. I see no reason why he would or should have created us in particular if he had prevented them—and hence no reason why he has wronged us by not doing so, ibid. 67.
I do not think it would have been possible, in the metaphysical or broadly logical sense that its relevant here, for me to exist in a world that differed much from the actual world in the evils occurring in the parts of history that contain my roots…My identity is established by my beginning…the identity of those gametes presumably depends in turn on their beginnings and on the identity of my parents, which depends on the identity of the gametes from which they came, and so on. It seems to me implausible to suppose that the required identities could have been maintained through generations in which the historical context differed radically from the actual world by the omission of many, or important, evils, ibid. 67-68.
You may still think, for example, that the life you had planned and hoped for before an evil befell you ten years ago would have been better than your actual life. Yet you may be so attached to actual projects, friendships, and experiences that would not have been part of that other life that you would *not* now wish to have had it instead of your actual life, ibid. 74.
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