Talk:Non-identity problem

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Add a Non-Identity Reasoning Page?

Non-identity reasoning has been applied outside of the non-identity problem. For example, in philosophy of religion, it has been applied to arguments from evil and the hiddenness argument. Wondering if it would be worth adding a page like that, though frankly this particular page could use some expansion itself. GreenRedGreen (talk) 06:25, 26 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I'm skeptical that there is enough coverage in the literature on non-identity reasoning for the topic to be considered notable enough to have its own article. It's probably better to expand this article with a "Nonidentity reasoning" section or other content. Alenoach (talk) 22:20, 26 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of expanding this article with additional applications. Then if down the road (even years from now) it makes sense to do a split, content will already be built out. GreenRedGreen (talk) 11:48, 27 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The paragraph on longtermism may benefit from some rework to clarify that it is person-affecting views that are in conflict with longtermism (most consequentialist views like total utilitarianism don't really care about the identity of future people and whether they already exist).

Also, the "at least as long as their lives are overall worth living" adds some weird asymmetry to the argument (supposing non-identity nullifies the positive value of future being, why wouldn't it also nullify the negative value of future suffering lives?), and the source seems to set aside the topic of the non-identity problem. If we are to cover asymmetric views, then we may have to be a bit clearer that it is one view among others. Alenoach (talk) 16:57, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to rehash longtermism entirely because it has its own article, but I agree there's definitely room to expand the little section I added regarding the intersection with the non-identity problem. GreenRedGreen (talk) 17:43, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Non-Identity or Nonidentity

As evidenced by the citations in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on this topic, both spellings are regularly used. Dictionaries also use both. It does not necessarily seem that one spelling is the more contemporary one either as there are articles from within the last 10 years that use both. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses nonidentity. But for what is it worth, Parfit used non-identity

Currently Wikipedia uses both, but I believe we ought to settle on one spelling for stylistic reasons.

I strongly prefer the non-identity spelling, but a downside is that this would require a page name change, though the URL slug could remain the same. Thoughts?

GreenRedGreen (talk) 05:13, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

For now, I just removed the hyphenated version, but I think we should still consider a name change. GreenRedGreen (talk) 02:59, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

A search for "non-identity problem" on Google Scholar returned 4640 results whereas "nonidentity problem" returned 1230. I think this should be relatively uncontroversial, so I made the renaming of the article. Alenoach (talk) 16:16, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Fantastic. Great working with you on this article. GreenRedGreen (talk) 17:44, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]