Abstract

On a business-as-usual policy, it seems inevitable that people in the distant future will live in a world with a more harmful climate. But can we really harm distant future people? If so, to what extent can we harm them? Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem (1984) has been taken by other scholars, such as David Boonin (2014), to support the idea that, as long as distant future people’s lives are still worth living (though harsh), they cannot be harmed generally since shutting down our business-as-usual would eliminate their very existence in the future. John Nolt (2018) counterargues that they can still be harmed if some of the consequences of our business-as-usual makes them worse off, although they benefit in general. In this paper I aim to show how these contemporary theories fail to fully account for the harm we may do to distant future people. Their mere focus on the concreteness of harm has missed something morally relevant. To address this, I argue that “endangering someone” also counts towards “harm”, since it causes the reasonable expectation of injury or death occurring, practically boosts the process of making people worse off, and negatively impacts the victim’s interest not to be endangered. Therefore, distant future people will start to be “invisibly” harmed once they are exposed to reasonably expectable worse-off situations, such as climate change, energy shortage, and environmental degradation in the future, before actual consequences occur.