Contractualist Reasons and Future Persons: A Contractualist Perspective on the Non-Identity Problem

Abstract

Derek Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem (NIP) holds that we cannot wrong future persons: every time we make a different decision, it can lead to a future with different people. When future people exist because of an action, surely they will approve of that action. How can an action then wrong future generations? In addition to the general problem for contractualism that future people do not yet exist, the NIP makes it impossible to relate wrongness to hypothetical future persons. Even if we treat future persons as if they exist, our actions will still not wrong them. The NIP assumes a narrow defined person-affecting restriction, where what is wrong depends on it being wrong for particular individuals. My thesis is that contractualist rights, based on a shared human nature, offers an account that shows how we can wrong future persons and avoids the NIP by defining the person-affecting restricting more broadly. The specific type of contractualism which I propose in this thesis - the Shared Nature Theory - is capable of defining how we can wrong future generations, with rights based on their humanity no matter who people will turn out to be. But the dissolution of the NIP is only possible, when we consider there cannot be a right to exist, as it would have us treat non-existing people as existing people.