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do this deliberately, for certain reasons. But she might refrain upon realizing she would not be there to help her children survive. Williams reminded us that that is how we would normally regard the relation between suicide and parenthood. However, when we started considering our supposed future selves, they would have the strange property of, on the one hand, be born only from the brain fission of their ancestor, while, on the other hand, the suicide of their ancestral would abort them completely. For Williams, the analogy became even worse when we had to conclude that the failure of our projects, and our subsequent suicides, would also kill all our "descendants", although they were descendants that would be born only with the fission and death (for Williams) of our ancestral self. This confused the issues of suicide and parenthood. In the first, we had to consider whether, our project having failed, we ought to commit suicide, killing our ancestral self. In the second, we had to decide if by means of brain fission we would have descendants with their own and different projects. Williams noted that the analogy confused the first kind of question with a question of the second kind, misrepresenting the importance of the first question for the theory of the self. Williams argued that suicide only made sense because we would be eliminating our future self, whose projects had failed. If the future self of a person were not another descendant self, but the future of his own self, then we could understand why this future must be eliminated with the failure of the project that kept the person motivated to live. But it did not make sense to prevent the birth of descendant selves because the life project of the ancestral self failed. Hence, from Parfit's view, according to Williams, suicide would be a strange kind of contraceptive act. The suicide case showed that our self was more fundamental exactly because it was he, and not his descendants, who would not be any more in the world after our self-destruction. It was the failure of the ancestral self's project that justified his suicide, and the abortion of the descendant selves was not necessarily related to this issue (Williams 1981, p. 11-12). McGinn also agreed with Williams that to abandon our contemporary concepts of personal identity just to adopt Parfit's