Climate change and the Non-Identity Problem

Today, climate change is becoming less like a dystopian story and more like an impending reality. Across the world, summers are getting hotter. Heatwaves are getting longer, and more frequent. With less snow my north Jersey town, the local ski resort opens 4-5 weeks a year, instead of for 4-5 months. So, although we haven't reached the blistering +4°C temperatures of the Cretaceous Period, our 1.2°C post industrialization increase is still major reason for alarm. Rightly, scientists and ordinary people are calling for policy makers to enact climate change policies to stop the progression of global warming and climate change as a whole.

Considering the possible damage that climate change can cause, it seems almost trivial to ask for justification of such policies. The classic justification is: "by stopping climate change, we are helping the people of the future who would have to live under the future effects of climate change." At a first glance, this makes sense. In fact, most theories against climate change policy choose to attack the existence of climate change, almost accepting the fact if if climate change were true the harm to future people would also be true.

Unfortunately, there is an issue with the logic that stopping climate change will help the future people living under it. In moral theory, this issue is called the Non-Identity Problem. The Non-Identity Problem appears when digging into the definition of what it means to help someone. An action helps someone when the action results in a person being in better condition when it occurs, compared to the person being in worse condition if the action had not occurred. Importantly, if the person with the action is not the same person as without the action, we cannot say that the action helped the person. This is an significant because enacting climate change policy will effect the existence of future people. Because climate policies like certain taxes and work opportunities affect peoples lives, and because these small effects add up and can eventually change when people decide to have children and how many children they decide to have, the future population with climate policies will not have the same identity as the future population without climate policies. After all, even changing the time of conception by a single day will change the identity of a future person. As such, when a policy has society wide effects multiplied over many decades, the future population will indeed have a different identity compared to the hypothetical population without the policy. This is significant because it means we cannot say that climate policies help the future population that would be living under climate change. The group living in climate change would not consist of the same individuals as the group living without climate change.

This non identity problem, which was first introduced by Derek Parfit in 1987, has been attacked and tinkered with by philosophers for decades. Yet, despite numerous attacks, it continues to undermine the intuitive assumption that we much end climate change in order to help the people of the future. For many, the solution is not to stop the fight for climate policies, but rather to change the moral motivations for climate policy. For example, perhaps a stronger justification is that we need climate policies to help preserve the institutions that we have today. You could say that institutions like countries are more likely to exist both in a world with and without climate policy, thus dodging the non-identity problem. However, in the most extreme of circumstances, a climate policy could lead to the destruction of a nation, thus returning us to the problem.

climate change !

Derek Parfit