Relation to the world· Nature and the livingdifficulty
Future generations
Do we have duties toward future generations?
Can we owe anything to beings who do not yet exist, who claim nothing, and whom our choices will bring into being as they will be? Making room for them can weigh heavily on the living; ignoring them means mortgaging a world we will never see. To take a position is to say how far our responsibility extends in time.
Responsibility principle
2Our power to act now extends to the living conditions of generations to come: we have a duty to act so that the effects of our actions remain compatible with the permanence of genuinely human life on Earth. The distant future enters the scope of morality.
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Baconinferable
Bacon conceives his enterprise as a bequest: he sows for harvests he will not see, founds a knowledge whose benefits will accrue to ages to come, and works for posterity more than for his own time. Yet this orientation toward those who will come is not the preservation principle of a , who seeks to shield future generations from our power: it is the reverse, the hope of handing down that increased power to them as a benefit.
Novum Organum, preface to the Great Instauration
Marxinferable
The meaning of present action lies wholly in the emancipation of future generations: today's revolutionary sacrifice is justified by tomorrow's liberated society. Marx even criticises treating the earth as property: no society owns it; men are merely its usufructuaries and must hand it on improved to succeeding generations, which leans toward a responsibility for the future.
Capital, vol. III, ch. 46 (men as mere usufructuaries of the earth, to be bequeathed improved)
Priority to the present
0Our obligations are owed first to the people who exist here and now: their needs are real and urgent, whereas the interests of future individuals remain hypothetical and uncertain. Sacrificing the present to a distant future would be unjust to the living.
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- PrescriptiveMoral Thought experimentThe world after
Our choices impoverish the distant world, but also decide who will be born into it: those people would not exist under a different policy. Can we harm them, if none of them is worse off than they would otherwise have been, having never existed otherwise?
the people of the future
Sub-problems to deepen this axis's discussion
- DescriptiveA right with no bearer?
A right seems to require a bearer who exists; future beings do not yet exist, claim nothing, can do nothing for us. Can there be an obligation with no reciprocity and no one to hold it, or does our duty toward them rest on something other than a right?
a being yet to be born - PrescriptiveMoralTo bring into being, or only not to harm?
Do we have a duty to bring future people into being, or only, if they are to exist, not to harm them? Nothing seems to require us to create happy beings, whereas creating miserable ones would be a wrong; and seeking to maximise total happiness leads to preferring a multitude of barely-good lives to a small flourishing humanity.
the population to come - PrescriptivePolitical & legalIs a distant good worth less?
Should a benefit or harm to future people count for less simply because it lies far off in time, as the economic reckoning that discounts the future does, or is that preference for the present a moral error, a mere failure of imagination? A very small annual rate is enough to make a distant catastrophe almost weightless today.
a future benefit
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptivePolitical & legalA fair share across the ages
Grant that we owe the future something: what is the fair division of resources and burdens across generations, how much must each age save, and who bears the cost of averting a distant harm, such as the climate burden?
resources across generations - PrescriptivePolitical & legalThe living, or the inheritance?
Do the living have the right to rewrite what the dead built, "the earth belongs to the living", or are we the trustees of a legacy we must hand on to the generations to come?
the generationsTradition and transformation - PrescriptiveExistentialFor whom to build after oneself?
To plant a tree whose shade you will never sit under: do we owe anything to those who will come, who have done nothing for us? Transmission turns the present toward a future that outlasts us.
those who will comeTemporal orientation