The Nonidentity Problem Explained: Ethics & Future Generations

The non-identity problem, discovered by Derek Parfit, concerns how our actions affect which people come into existence. Since when a human conception occurs determines which gametes fuse together to create an embryo, many of our acts affect when conceptions occur and which people will be involved. This leads to the problem that many acts we do bring about what we think of as bad effects in people's lives, yet these acts are not on balance bad for those people and don't violate their rights, precisely because the acts are necessary conditions for the existence of the people in whose lives they occur. Applying this to climate change: if we continue current policies, terrible effects will occur 100 years from now, but people's lives will still be worth living. If we change policies, the people who would have lived under current policies won't exist, and different people will exist instead. This means we can't explain why causing climate change is wrong by saying it's bad for particular people, because those people wouldn't exist if we acted differently.

The non-identity problem is a philosophical concept where decisions made today affect future generations who cannot exist without those decisions. If a power plant is built, people will live in the surrounding town, have children, and those children will be sick due to pollution. However, if the plant isn't built, those people and children would never exist. Therefore, building the plant doesn't make anyone worse off than they would otherwise have been, since they only exist in the 'bad' timeline. This creates a paradox where harmful actions don't technically harm anyone, making it difficult to argue against them using traditional ethical frameworks.

Longtermism extends effective altruism to prioritize actions based on their potential impact on future generations, arguing that current decisions could determine whether humanity survives for millions of years or goes extinct. This framework treats trillions of potential future people as morally significant stakeholders. However, this raises the non-identity problem: our actions don't just affect what happens to existing people but determine who comes into existence at all. Taking public transport instead of driving might statistically alter conception timing enough to change which sperm meets which egg, thereby determining who is born. This means any discussion about future people must acknowledge that our actions fundamentally determine which individuals will ever exist, creating philosophical challenges for consequentialist ethics that must weigh obligations to people who don't yet exist against immediate moral obligations to current individuals.

Derek Parfit's Non-Identity Problem arises from the Person-Affecting Principle, which states that an action is better or worse only if it makes someone better or worse off. When policies affect who exists in the future (rather than how well off existing people are), this principle becomes problematic. For example, a policy that creates different future people cannot be evaluated as making anyone better or worse off, since those people wouldn't exist otherwise. This leads to the conclusion that we should only consider the welfare of beings whose existence is certain, which conflicts with time neutrality and long-termism.

This section presents the non-identity problem, attributed to Derek Parfit, which states that our current choices determine which specific individuals will exist in the future. If we choose different climate policies, different people will be born and come into existence. This creates an ethical puzzle: if we choose policies causing dangerous climate change, those affected individuals never would have existed under alternative policies. Thus, it's unclear whom we are harming, since those who exist under harmful policies owe their very existence to those choices. Broome addresses this by distinguishing duties of justice (specific obligations to particular individuals) from duties of goodness (general obligations to promote well-being). Even if we have no duty of justice toward future individuals, we still have duties of goodness to make the world better for whoever exists. A world with dangerous climate change causing widespread suffering is worse than a world with limited warming and less suffering. Thus, duties of goodness require preferring policies that reduce future suffering, regardless of whether those future individuals exist because of our choices.

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) raises profound ethical questions about embryo selection. From a perspective of robust protection of human life from conception, PGD involves identifying embryonic human beings and choosing against those with disfavored traits, resulting in their premature destruction. There is a moral distinction between wanting healthy children (which exists) and choosing to have children who will be healthier (which involves creating and destroying embryos). The tension exists between libertarian impulses favoring parental autonomy and concerns about state involvement in defining acceptable parenting. Michael Sandel's work on perfectionism explores how parental desires shape children in ways that may distort the parent-child relationship.

Julian Savulesco, a prominent Australian bioethicist, formulated the principle of procreative beneficence in 2001. He argues that IVF with PGD enables eugenic embryo selection, and couples have a moral duty to choose embryos most likely to enjoy the 'best life.' This includes not just disease absence but also behavioral genetics traits like intelligence, aggression, and other complex behaviors. Savulesco distinguishes this from eugenics, which he defines as state-oriented selective reproduction, while procreative beneficence is a private project. The presenter critiques this as maintaining problematic assumptions about intelligence as an essential, hereditary trait.

This section explains preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and its moral implications. PGD involves fertilizing eggs in a laboratory, screening embryos for genetic defects, and selecting only those without abnormalities for implantation. The Church teaches this is morally problematic because it treats embryos as disposable material. The section references biblical consequences for killing unborn children and describes PGD as a eugenics mentality that measures human value based on physical normality. The Church warns this approach opens the door to infanticide and euthanasia.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves creating embryos through IVF, selecting them based on genetic characteristics, and discarding unselected embryos, which from a biblical perspective constitutes a competence overreach by humans taking rights that belong solely to God as the Creator; since humans are created in God's image (Genesis 1:27) and children are gifts from the Lord (Psalm 127:3), no human has the right to demand a healthy child or to destroy embryos, making PGD ethically unacceptable.

Julian Savulescu, an Oxford ethics expert, represents 'challenging bioethics' and argues that humanity is moving toward the role of god because the potential to create artificial life is real. He advocates applying all scientific advances with an ethics that transcends religious and metaphysical presuppositions. His key thesis is the 'principle of procreative beneficence' - the moral obligation to genetically improve children in both health and cognitive and affective capabilities. This represents a shift in ethical thinking about human enhancement.

The non-identity problem reveals a fundamental flaw in traditional moral reasoning when evaluating policies affecting future generations. When a policy determines who exists (such as a risky nuclear waste policy), we cannot condemn it using standard person-affecting principles because those affected wouldn't exist without the policy. Even those suffering from such policies would prefer existence over non-existence. This forces us to abandon the idea that something is wrong only if it harms specific people. Parfit proposes impersonal principles—average and total principles—that evaluate outcomes based on aggregate measures rather than individual welfare. However, each approach creates new problems: the impersonal total principle leads to the repugnant conclusion, while the impersonal average principle fails to adequately address certain cases.

The non-identity problem arises when actions affect who will be born. For example, drastic climate action might prevent certain people from being born (who would have miserable lives due to droughts and typhoons) while bringing into existence a different set of people with better lives. Since those who would have suffered wouldn't exist in the alternative scenario, there is no particular person who is worse off. Parfit argues we must still take action because it is better to have a population with flourishing lives than a completely different population with less flourishing lives—not because any particular person is made better off, but because of an impartial consequentialist view that one set of people having good lives is preferable to another set having worse lives.

The Non-Identity Problem, which asks whether creating disadvantaged individuals (like disabled or poor people) is morally acceptable because they wouldn't exist otherwise, can be solved by adopting pansychism—the view that consciousness is fundamental to the universe and continuously flows through all beings. Under this framework, personal identity lies in consciousness rather than DNA, meaning there is only one unified self experiencing different physical forms over time. This eliminates the ethical dilemma of comparing different possible versions of oneself, as all individuals are ultimately manifestations of the same underlying consciousness.

The non-identity problem challenges our moral obligations to future generations by arguing that actions affecting future people cannot be evaluated using traditional welfare-based ethics, since changing our actions would bring into existence entirely different individuals; this paradox is resolved by recognizing that people have rights beyond mere welfare, such as the right to be treated as ends in themselves rather than mere means to others' desires.