Parfit is too Hypothetical

When reading Derek Parfit's paper, I was somewhat confused as to what his position was on whether or not we should care about future generations and thus, take measures to ensure their survival. From what I gathered, it appears that Parfit believes that we have an obligation to future generations even if those generations consist of different people based on what decisions we make. He believes that wrongs do not require a victim. I believe in order for something to be wrong, it must either affect someone in a harmful way or have the potential to detrimentally affect someone's life. I agree with Parfit that we are somewhat to blame if people in the future are harmed by something we do now, knowing it may have a detrimental affect in the future.

However, Parfit does not convince me that we are more obligated to ensuring the survival of future generations than we are in preserving our current generation. Parit claims that when we make a decision, we must take into consideration not only those individuals who will be alive in future generations, but also those individuals who may have lived if we had made a different choice. Using this method, it is extremely difficult to determine which choice is the better or more "moral" one as we cannot predict the future and exactly what people will be in it. I cannot see a practical application to Parit's argument.

If I have to make a choice as to whether to make life better for someone in the present generation or make a choice that may or may not help someone who may or may not exist in the future, I will be likely to help the person who is alive now. This is not to say that I don't care about the well-being of future generations as I do think it is important to do what we can to preserve resources for them, but I do not think that we should care more about future generations than the generation that is struggling to survive right now. The bottom line is that Parfit has an interesting idea, but it appears to be based too much on hypothetical situations than on concrete evidence.