Parfit's Non-Identity Problem

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit brought an important feature into the consideration related to the moral duty of the existing people toward the future people. Parfit starts with stating that it is when the parents mate that has a decisive impact on who or which particular person is born. This implies that if someone’s parents had not mated at a certain time, that someone would have been replaced by someone else. The implication of this argument is that the policies existing people implement at the present time have an effect on who will be born in the future. Building factories that have no hazardous effects on the environment now or in the near future, but that may release poisonous gases and chemicals three centuries from now has an impact
According to Parfit, the policy is bad but it has not made the future people worse off compared to the way they would have been without the enactment of this policy.
The non-identity problem is a problem related to any substantive theory of the existing people’s moral obligations toward future individual which implies that “those obligations are based on a certain feature of future individuals – that they will be better off (however, one wishes to understand the concept of being better off) if present individuals do some actions rather than other actions” (Rainbolt, 2006, p. 228). The non-identity problem imparts a need for the existing people to draw comparison between one possible group of future people i.e. people that will exist if existing people make efforts to
Just like parents keep saving money all their lives for their children but the children in many cases outdo their parents financially through hard work or good luck or both and never need the money saved for them by their parents in the first place, it is the parents’ whose quality of life could have been better had they never saved any money for their children and had instead used it to fulfill their own desires. Modern science is advancing at a very fast pace and new knowledge is being created through rapid research and development. In the past, there used to be steam-engines, but not oil and gas are used as fuels rather than steam. It may be possible that future people might use solar energy and wind energy to drive rather than oil and gas, both of which are in abundance and cannot be reduced through consumption. It is only a matter of time until we will reach that stage as those forms of energy have already been started to be used but at a limited scale. In this instance, saving oil and gas resources for the future people will only make the existing people suffer because science, to date, has not advanced to the extent that use of these resources can be