Last week I dropped in on what turned out to be a seminar in practical philosophy, featuring a paper about resultant moral luck. This week I was back, with more preparation this time - i.e., I read the paper in advance.

This week’s discussion was about the Non-Identity Problem as it pertains to climate action. Going into this, I had not read about the Non-Identity Problem, so just as with moral luck this was completely new to me.

As before, this was a draft paper not intended for circulation, so here I’m going to talk more about what I learned about the Non-Identity Problem and some of the more general themes that came up.

The Non-Identity Problem

As I understood it, the Non-Identity Problem (NIP) deals with moral considerations and responsibilities that we, as people alive today, have (or not) toward people who do not yet exist.

When we make decisions that affect future generations - like passing climate policies or deciding not to - our actions not only determine how people who are not yet born will live, but even who will come into existence. If we are morally obligated to prevent harm, but the sufferer of the harm does not yet exist, do we have any obligations to those non-existent future-potential-sufferers? What if climate actions today would arguably harm, in some way, people who are already alive? Are we obligated to not take action because we have more responsibilities to prevent harm for those who can actually experience it?

If no one is “harmed,” how do we justify strong climate action?

The discussion focusd largely on institutional agents, like states, and an institionalized version of the Non-Identity Problem - i.e., how will NIP affect states’ arguments in courts either for or against robust climate action?

The courts and future generations

Courts often rely on harm-based reasoning: for a case to move forward, someone usually needs to show they’ve been harmed. But what happens when the plaintiffs are advocating for people who don’t exist yet?

States often make climate-based commitments and claims that they nevertheless resist acting on when it is inconvenient. Much of the talk was about enforcement of climate action, and how NIP may be used by institutional agents to prevent courts from ordering them to certain climate actions. The NIP provides a bit of an escape hatch for institutional agents: if future generations wouldn’t exist without their actions, they can argue that no harm has been done.

The conversation also touched on how this plays out in practice. By opening the system up to bring cases on behalf of people who do not yet exist, courts could face an overwhelming number of claims — essentially a system overload. This was somewhat debated during the conversation - because states could still be bogged down if currently alive people go to the courts and argue that they are being harmed by climate inaction.

Is this a philosopher’s issue or an enforcement issue?

Much of the discussion focused on practical implications and encouraging/prescribing climate action. Not just on whether we should do it, but how institutional agents can use the NIP to argue against doing it.

One analogy someone brought up stuck with me. Imagine Sweden passes a policy capping kindergarden fees, which leads to different families deciding to have children that otherwise might not have. That policy will have shaped the next generation — it determines who exists. In reality, almost every decision we make, every policy we adopt, will have an effect on who exists down the line. Now, what if kindergarden fees were raised instead? Who will not be born who othewise might have been, and how will that future-person be affected by living with parents who are less well off financially than they otherwise would have been, by having to spend more money on kindergarden fees?

At least with kindergarden fees, future generations could vote to change the policy (albeit after the generation affected by the policy already ‘suffers’ the consequences, I guess?) With climate policies, the actions or inactions we take will have irreversible consequences that future generations will have no choice but to live with - at least those of them that are born :)

It was also brought up that we assume future generations would have otherwise had a good, positive life. If future generations will already be harmed in other ways, climate inaction causing further suffering in the future could be considered not as negatively impactful in relation to other negative parts of their existence.

“All of us are future persons, hopefully.”

The topic of clarifying what we mean by “future persons” came up:

“All of us are future persons, hopefully.”

(In that hopefully we will be alive for some time in the future… but of course the future persons discussed here are persons who are not yet born.)

I hope we’re all future persons, too…

Och sedan gick vi till lunch, och jag fick öva min svenska!