Harming Groups: A Reflection on Long-term Harms of Climate Change

This project examines Derek Parfit’s (1984) non-identity problem, which suggests that our actions cannot harm future people if they would not exist without those actions. David Boonin’s (2014) non-identity argument proposes that if distant future people’s lives are worth living, our current actions, such as burning fossil fuels and causing climate change, cannot be bad for them. This argument relies on the person-affecting view, which is the belief that an action can only be bad if it is bad for some particular person(s). Therefore, if an action does not affect any particular person(s), it cannot be considered a harm. Boonin’s argument has led to a knotty problem: if we cannot appeal to the harm our actions do to future people who would not otherwise exist if we acted in other ways, it is difficult to explain why certain actions of that sort are wrong. Philosophers have proposed three strategies to confront it: accept the conclusion that no one is harmed, reject the person-affecting view, or accept the person-affecting view but reject the conclusion that no one was harmed.

I offer a solution by attacking the person-affecting view and proposing a non-person affecting type of harm called “group-affecting harm” or “group harm”. The idea is that even though our actions cannot harm any particular person(s), they can harm particular groups of people. These groups of people can be harmed by climate change even if our actions do not make any of their particular members worse off than they otherwise would have been. I argue that groups of people are independent entities over and above the mere aggregate of their constituents and can also have their own interests and well-being that can be improved or diminished. Therefore, even when our actions affect what people come to exist and change the membership of certain groups, those actions can still harm the groups themselves, which gives us strong reasons not to act in those ways.