Person-affecting view

Variants

• Gustaf Arrhenius formulates the "person-affecting restriction" as saying that moral claims "necessarily involve a reference to humans", so that statements only referencing "the scenery" or "the balance of the ecosystem" are excluded from moral consideration.
• Nick Beckstead states that the person-affecting view claims the following: "When aggregating the interests of different people to determine the value of an outcome, the interests of 'extra' people count for less or can be ignored". Beckstead further distinguishes between moderate and strict person-affecting views, where moderate views give less weight to "extra" people while strict views do not consider "extra" people at all.
• There are also wide and narrow person-affecting views, as well as an asymmetric view. The asymmetric view in particular can lead one to conclude that human extinction is good, according to Beckstead, but, according to Simon Knutsson, this can be the case for utilitarianism and consequentialism generally, not just asymmetric consequentialist theories, like negative utilitarianism and negative consequentialism.