Can People Who Do Not Yet Exist Have Claims on Us?

When a facility is built that may leave pollution for a century, the people affected for the longest time have not yet been born. One intuitive objection is that we do not know who they are, and they cannot now claim rights against us. How, then, could the present generation owe them anything?

In discussing justice between generations, Rawls introduced the problem of “just savings”: each generation should preserve conditions sufficient to sustain just institutions. Parfit exposed a harder difficulty, the non-identity problem. Different energy policies alter employment, migration, meetings and the timing of births, so different policies will probably lead to different people existing. A future person whose life is still worth living cannot simply say, “I would have been better off under the other policy”, because under that policy they might never have existed.

This problem weakens one narrow account of harm, but it does not show that we may treat the future however we like. Even if we cannot name future rights-holders, we can foresee that people will need drinkable water, a habitable environment and workable institutions. My view is that duties across generations need not wait for an identifiable victim. They can rest on foreseeable basic human interests, avoiding grave risks, and refusing to leave irreversible costs entirely to those who come later.

Nor does this mean that future interests always override present needs. Sound judgement must compare severity, duration, reversibility and the burdens placed on people alive now. Future people do not yet exist, which makes responsibility harder to allocate; it does not make the future morally empty.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/