Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Priority to the present
Axis: Future generations — Do we have duties toward future generations?
Our 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.
- 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 - 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 - 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