Dissolving the Non-Identity Problem: The Continuity Imperative as a Pragmatic Alternative

The Non-Identity Problem (NIP), popularized by Derek Parfit, has persisted as an ostensibly intractable puzzle in population ethics for over four decades. This paper argues that the problem’s persistence reveals less about genuine moral paradox and more about the limitations of individualistic, person-affecting frameworks divorced from survival imperatives. I propose that NIP dissolves under a pragmatic, species-oriented ethic I term the Continuity Imperative (CI)—a framework that prioritizes infrastructure of possibility over identity-specific harm accounting, emphasizes best-effort stewardship rather than guaranteed outcomes, and recognizes future generations as resilient agents rather than passive recipients. By rejecting the person-affecting restriction and focusing on the momentum of human flourishing across generations, this approach bypasses the logical trap while providing actionable guidance for real-world issues like climate policy and technological development. Crucially, recent person-affecting proposals fail because they share a fatal assumption: that institutional, political, and social infrastructure enabling individual rights remains stable regardless of policy choices. In reality, depletion policies trigger cascading institutional degradation that destroys the very conditions under which rights can be protected. CI succeeds by evaluating policies not through hypothetical identity comparisons, but through their impact on systemic conditions enabling human flourishing.