š Book: What We Owe to Future People
Author:: Elizabeth Finneron-Burns;
LANGUAGE:: en
Notes and Highlights
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Intergenerational ethics is not just philosophically interesting; it is also of great practical importance, especially given human beingsā ability to affect the quality of life of the people who will inhabit the world in the future.
It is crucial to understand what it is we owe to future people in terms of both providing benefits (e.g., a good environment) and preventing burdens (e.g., large public debts).
The seemingly simple question āWhat do we owe to future people?ā actually contains a number of different questions, including what principle(s) of justice, if any, apply over time, and to whom. But it also extends beyond considerations of justice to include other moral ideals such as basic humanitarian duties and the value of promoting good states of affairs that are not necessarily considered to be matters of ājusticeā. For example, it might be thought that it would be bad if humans became extinct, but it could not be said to be unjust since there is no one to whom or for whom it is unjust or unfair.3 So we may believe that we ought not to choose principles that result in the end of the human species, but the objection to such principles would not arise from a claim about injustice.
This approach regards the treatment of future people as if it were no different from that of contemporaries. The potential problem with this approach is that there are a number of ways in which the situation of future people is quite different, and so one might reasonably wonder whether we really can just apply the theories we use intragenerationally to the intergenerational context.
āWho would I be if my parents had married other people?ā is obviously āno one.ā9 Quite simply, if your mother had conceived with a man other than your father, you would not exist. Someone would exist, but they would not be you.
Non-Identity Problem: If an action we perform causes a person to exist with a very bad but still barely-worth-living life, our action has not harmed him since if we had not performed it, he would never have existed.
The non-identity problem is a challenge to accounts of obligations to the future because it suggests that we cannot harm people in the future unless it is the case that the people who are created will exist regardless of what actions we take
There is an intuitive moral objection to actions that cause people to have only barely-worth-living lives, especially when the burdens in question were avoidable.
Whereas Scanlon asks what others could reasonably reject, Rawls seeks the set of principles that everybody would accept under the conditions of the veil of ignorance and general mutual disinterest.
growth remains constant or increases, this would require earlier (poorer) generations to save for the benefit of later (wealthier) ones. Such a thought would be inconsistent with the spirit of the rest of Rawlsā theory of justice, which gives priority to the worst-off because requiring the poorer, earlier generations to save would actually be giving priority to the best-off.
The parties care about the welfare of their immediate descendants, so every person in the original position cares about somebody and every person in the generation that follows has somebody who cares about them.17 But why are the parties not able to have concern for other people when dealing with contemporaries but are able to carry such a concern for others when considering intergenerational justice?
However, neither (2) nor (2*) explains the source of an obligation to refrain from actions that would not hurt the very next generations, but whose consequences will not be felt until several generations down the line (what Brian Barry called āsleepersā)
People will choose to save out of self-interest because they would not want to be part of a generation that came late in a chain of non-saving generations.
Mulgan thinks we can avoid this result only by denying that there are lives that are not worth living. Since a life worth living is something that people generally enjoy and possible people would desire, it seems reasonable to say that for the possible people in the original position existence above the threshold at which a life becomes worth living is preferable to non-existence. If a party in the original position did not know if they would exist or not, they would therefore presumably choose a principle that maximised their probability of existing as long as they were above the threshold at which a life is worth living.
First, it must avoid ad hoc motivational assumptions that explain why we choose to fulfill our obligations to the future.
In everyday life, when we ask a person to āplease be reasonable!ā we are asking them to take othersā interests into account when forming judgements about what to do.
If I wish to break a promise I made to my friend to go to the cinema with her, I must be able to offer good reasons for this. Perhaps I encountered a person in need of rescue on the way, or I have caught the flu and feel too ill to go out. Likewise, I must consider what reasons she could have for rejecting a principle that allowed me to break my promise. She might, for example, have been in need of cheering up and will be very disappointed if I cancel our plans. We can act wrongly either by acting according to unacceptable reasons (reasons that are disallowed, or to which we have given too much weight), or by failing to consider the reasons that others might have to reject our action.
For example, a certain brand of utilitarian could argue that a healthy person ought to donate all of their organs (and by consequence their life) to save the lives of six others because the net total utility that is gained is higher than if the healthy person kept their organs and the six others died. The reason that could be offered in favour of the donation would have to be given on behalf of the six and would stem from the aggregated benefit the group would enjoy. However, contractualism would not allow the strong reason the healthy person has to want to keep their organs to be outweighed by the aggregation of each one of the sixās individually smaller reasons.
The focus of contractualism is the standpoint of individuals, not those of aggregated individuals or groups. In other words, a person must object to a principle on their own behalf, not on behalf of a group. This prevents interpersonal aggregation and ensures that a number of smaller complaints cannot outweigh a very weighty burden a single person could face.
It is neither necessary nor always sufficient that a principle negatively affects a personās well-being in order for it to be reasonably rejected. It is not necessary because a person could reject a principle even though it did not negatively affect his well-being. In other words, reasons other than an impact on well-being can be offered in objection to a principle. Such reasons include unfairness or arbitrariness, or other background entitlements such as rights. In James Woodwardās example, a Black man is denied boarding on an airplane because of the colour of his skin. The plane ultimately crashes, killing all those on board. In this case the manās well-being was not negatively affected all things considered (in fact, he may even have been benefited), but he could still reasonably reject any principle that allowed the airline to deny him boarding on the basis of his race.54 His objection to this principle would likely be based on the fact that it was discriminatory and arbitrary and failed to recognise him as an equal moral agent.
For example, if the enslavement of a particular race were currently permitted and a principle were considered that would prohibit it, current slave owners could not reasonably reject it simply on the basis of their reduced well-being. They would certainly be made worse off by the principle, but others (in particular, the slaves) are made much worse off by an alternative principle that permits it.
Essentially, increases or decreases in well-being can be offered as reasons in favour of or in objection to a principle, but well-being does not function as a sort of supreme value, against which all principles are evaluated. Rather, it is just one element that is drawn upon in support of or against moral principles.
Scope-as-sphere: what areas of morality does the theory cover?Scope-as-agents: Who does the theory apply to?
In contractualism people are not aggregated in order to determine the value of certain principles. Rather, each personās life and objections are taken into account.
The focus on equal moral status and respect means that it will likely not be a significant problem to explain why the theory can extend to future people since no actual interaction or reciprocity is required.
[A]ny actual human being . . . whether existing now or only at some point past or future time, constitutes a point of view relative to which the question of justifiability makes sense, and we have reason to value the justifiability of our actions to these peopleāthat is to say, to those who are already dead, or are not yet born, as well as to our contemporaries.
They are not here for us to ask them what they could reasonably reject, and conditions may change dramatically over time such that it becomes difficult to predict to what a person might reasonably object one hundred years from now. One option is to adopt a trustee model whereby we take into account objections that could be raised by someone on behalf of another person.
Contractualism is comparative, meaning that we have to look not only at what reasons others (for our purposes, in the future) might have to object to principles, but also at the reasons we can offer in favour of the principles we wish to follow.
Although we may create somebody, we have no control over the particular people who are created, and the reasons used to justify the principle cannot be the creation of a particular person or set of persons.
I will argue that the fact that a principle leads to a particular personās existence does not mean that that person has no reason to reject it. In other words, I will defend the claim that a person can reasonably reject a principle even though it caused them to exist.
rather, we ought to take existence as a given and ask whether they could reasonably reject the circumstances in which they do exist.
If a principle permits the creation of a person with a barely-worth-living life, the person who is created has grounds for rejecting that principle.
Scanlonās claim is that inequality leads to control/power over others.
In the intergenerational context, earlier generations control later ones, but it is not because of unequal distributions between them, but because of ātimeās arrowā.
always exercise a significant amount of power and control over future generations, and this isnāt exacerbated by earlier generations having more material wealth. For the same reason, later generations being significantly better off than their predecessors in no way gives them any power to control those who have come before them. Thereās no objection to intergenerational inequality on the basis of Control.
It is evident that we are all already better off than any particular past generation. For all generations to be at the same level as a past generation (whichever one is selected), we would have to level down.
The first is that we cannot benefit the dead; following on from that, the second is that it does not make sense to make ourselves worse off for the sake of equality with people from the past who will not be impacted in any way by our decision.
primarily because how well off āweā are is an arbitrary baseline, meaning that the amount owed to future generations is contingent only on how well off the previous generation happens to be and not on what people actually need or how their lives go.
peopleās expected absolute, rather than comparative, quality of life.
Upward Transfers. The objection here is that strict sufficientarian principles could recommend benefiting the better-off by tiny amounts, even if much larger benefits could have been given to the worst-off.28 Imagine one person is very close to but still slightly below the threshold, and another is far below it. Imagine we have some resources that we can distribute to either person. If we give them to the person close to the threshold, she will be bumped just over it, and if we give them to the other person, they will be significantly benefited but still remain below the threshold. Strict sufficientarianism requires us to prioritise the better-off person since that would result in more people living sufficiently good lives.
If I am able to improve someoneās quality of life at no or very little cost to myself, there seems to be no reason I should not do so.
The current generationās reason for wanting to increase their quality of life beyond sufficiency is much weaker than future generationsā reason to want to increase their future quality of life, given that the latter will be below sufficiency no matter what.
Insufficient Resources: When the current generation is not able to provide future generations with the opportunity to live sufficiently good lives without sacrificing sufficiency themselves, the current generation is permitted to prioritize their own sufficiency. Once the current generation has achieved sufficiency, they must try to leave future generations as well off as possible.
Additional Resources: The current generation is required to leave resources to give future generations the opportunity to enjoy more than sufficiently good lives if it would require minimal or no sacrifice.
However, population size is of course not fixed and we have a significant amount of control over how big the next few generations will be.
Procreative Balanceā where āprocreation is permissible when the risk you impose as a procreator on your children would not be irrational for you to accept as a condition of your own birth (assuming that you will exist), in exchange for the permission to procreate under these risk conditions.ā9
On a more impersonal level, it is bad for there to be people with insufficiently good lives. This is part of the reason we try to help people who live in poverty, for example.
When we are rescuing a person, not only might it be the case that we do not have any special relationship or obligation to that person, but we are also presumably not directly causally responsible for their predicament.
A disease is not a moral agent
that we ought to rescue Jones despite the fact that millions of people will miss out on watching the match because there are limits to what we can do to others in the name of the common good or utility
The individualist reasons restriction precludes imposing a harm on someone for the sake of aggregated benefits to othersāand therefore also precludes āriskā imposition whenever it is guaranteed to be imposed on someone for the sake of benefiting others.
relative to the probability of the bad outcome coming to fruition.
In 1990 the government of Norway decided to put the income from the countryās petroleum industry into a pension fund. The proceeds from oil have been invested and have grown significantly since the fundās establishment, and as of early 2023 the fund was worth almost US$1.3 trillion.9
The idea is that Norway has substituted monetary wealth for natural resource wealth:
almost all reasons for procreation are instrumentalāto enjoy the goods of parenting, to create companions for existing children, to have someone to take care of you in old age, to fulfil religious obligations, and so on.6 Almost no one creates children for the purpose of giving a child the opportunity to exist.
vector-borne diseases, in particular from dengue fever, which is expected to spread geographically and put additional billions of people at risk by the end of the century
This suggests that research on existential risk should be focused not necessarily on reducing the risk of extinction itself, but on reducing the harm, pain, and suffering of the people who will exist when it happens. This may sound defeatist or plainly wrong to some people. But if human extinction really is inevitable, seeking to put it off as long as possible is saying to future people: āI didnāt want my generation or those I care about to be the ones to suffer the pain of extinction occurring, so I did everything I could to make sure you experienced it instead.ā
Closely related to existential risk is the relatively new philosophy of ālongtermismā. The basic premise of longtermism is that future people matter just as much as current people, so we āought to be concerned with ensuring that the far future goes well.ā14 Furthermore, the expected number of future lives is vast.15 Consequently, if our goal is to do the most good, then the key moral priority for us should be shaping the far future by preventing premature human extinction for as long as possible and developing artificial superintelligence, even if this comes at the expense of current people.
can be easily translated to and contribute to debates about justice among contemporaries including domestic global justice.
In this type of case, current governments would run deficit budgets (spending more than they take in through taxing current people) to pay for goods and services that benefit current people with the understanding that the debts would be paid off by future people.
However, applying the same principle in all cases sometimes led to unintuitive results because it did not sufficiently take into account the circumstances of each agent.
Once the strength of different partiesā reasons was established, partly by their distance from the threshold, these reasons were then balanced against each other in the usual contractualist manner.