The Non-Identity Problem points at a paradox regarding harming future individuals.
Derek Parfit, the philosopher behind this claim, argues that despite the intuition that it is wrong to create a person in the case of what is considered to be severe congenital impairments, or in the case of what is considered to be an impaired environmental starting point, actually, as long as that person would have a life considered to be worth living overall, that person couldn’t be regarded as a victim of the impairments, or to even be harmed by them, since preventing them necessarily means that that person wouldn’t exist at all and so wouldn’t have what is considered as an overall worth living life.

Parfit himself doesn’t necessarily support the conclusions coming from this reasoning, but suggests that ethicists must develop a new ethical theory to resolve the paradox that stems from the fact that on the one hand we have a very strong intuition that creating a person with foreseen severe impairments is harming that person, and on the other hand, that as long as that person’s life is considered worth living overall, it is hard to point at a specific person who is harmed by the severe impairments, which without them that person could not exit at all. This new theory Parfit is referring to (which he calls theory X) must resolve the problem that we feel that an act is wrong despite that it is not wrong for anyone specific, or in other words, it needs to answer the question – how can an act be considered a harm if no one was harmed by it?

So despite that Parfit himself originally wished to resolve a paradox, his argument fed and still feeds many pro-natalitsts who are asking, how can the act of creating someone be wrong if it is not bad for anyone specific?

In this post, as well as the next two, I’ll address the three main notions implied by the non-identity problem.

Thousands of Identified Victims

The first notion implied by the non-identity problem, involves the narrow person-affecting ethical theory, according to which – an act is wrong only if it makes things worse for a particular, identified person. In Parfit’s words, “the “bad” act must be “bad for” someone” (Parfit 1987, p.363), and in the case of creating a person with what is considered to be foreseen severe impairments (be them biological or environmental), yet whose life is considered to be worth living overall, it is hard to point at a specific person who is harmed by that action.

In the second and third parts I argue that the person created is harmed even if that person would have a life considered to be worth living overall. But even if, for the sake of the argument, I’ll accept the claim that as long as the created person has a life considered to be worth living that person wasn’t harmed, that doesn’t make its creation ethical, even according to the narrow person-affecting ethical theory alone, because each procreation is always bad for a particular identified someone. There is always a specific person who is harmed by the creation of each person, a specific person with a specific identity. In fact there are thousands, and these are the thousands of persons who will be harmed as part of supporting the existence of the created person. Every person has to eat, and every food has a price. Unfortunately, most people are choosing the most harmful option – animal based foods. Each person directly consumes thousands of animals. More accurate average figures are varied according to each person’s location. An average American meat eater for example consumes more than 2,020 chickens, about 1,700 fish, more than 70 turkeys, more than 30 pigs and sheep, about 11 cows, and tens of thousands of aquatic animals.
Since most humans, more than 95% of them actually, are not even vegans – the most basic and primal ethical decision every person must make – the creation of each human person forces the creation of thousands of persons whose lives are of the most miserable lives imaginable.
Besides the harm inflicted directly by eating animals, each person also harms many others by eating plant based food, as well as by buying clothes, shoes, cosmetics, detergents, plastic, paper, metals, using electricity, transportation, and practically every possible action. Every action is at others’ expense. Procreation is always bad since it is always bad for someone. Even if one insists it is not bad for the one created, it is still bad for someone. Extremely bad, and for many someones.

Everyone who decides to procreate harms someone even if the created person would live a life considered to be worth living, since that creation comes at the cost of a life not worth living for many others. Even if the created person isn’t miserable, it would definitely make others miserable.
It is not moral to create lives not worth living even by the premises of the non-identity problem, and the creation of new people is definitely causing the creation of many lives not worth living – the lives of those who would be created to support the lives of the new created people. That is mainly the lives of animals in factory farms meaning more than 160 billion animals per year which would live lives not worth living. The more people created, and no matter if their own lives would be considered worth living or not, the more lives not worth living are created in general.
So even if we’ll accept, for the sake of the argument, the criterion of a life worth living, still, since creating people is necessarily creating lives not worth living, if not theirs then definitely the lives of the ones they would harm – sentient creatures who feel nothing but suffering for their entire lives – it is never ethical to procreate.

So we don’t need to explain how acts that make things worse for no one, such as creating a person whose life is considered worth living, can be wrong, since procreation is never an act that makes things worse for no one. In fact, it makes things horrendous for thousands.

References

Benatar David (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Finneron-Burns E (2015) What we owe to future people: a contractualist account of intergenerational ethics.

Gardner Molly (2015) A harm-based solution to the non-identity problem. Ergo; 2(17) pp. 427-444

Gardner Molly (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

McMahan Jeff (2009) Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In: Roberts MA, Wasserman DT(eds) Harming future persons: ethics, genetics and the nonidentity problem. Springer, New York

Parfit Derek Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press 1986)

Seana Valentine Shiffrin Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Steinbock, Bonnie Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Weinberg Rivka Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
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Weinberg Rivka Identifying and dissolving the non-identity problem. Philos Stud (2008) (137):3–18

Wolf, C. Intergenerational justice. In Blackwell companion to applied ethics, eds. (2003)