Temporal Morality: The Extent of Our Owes to Future Persons
At its core, morality is about empathy: it is about “putting ourselves in others’ shoes, treating their interests as we do our own”2 and deriving meaning from helping others. Moral obligations arise when a course of action is morally required, and thus a moral agent is blameworthy if they fail to meet it. They can typically be collapsed into a general responsibility “not to cause unjustified harm”3. Yet when our conception of morality also extends to the interests of future, unconceived persons, moral obligations are complicated. On one hand, there is a common intuition at the heart of Long-Termism4 that future people are in fact, people: in the words of William McAskill, “[f]uture people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better”5. On the other hand, it is unclear a) if these obligations still apply when these individuals have not yet been conceived and thus their existence is speculative; b) if present-day persons even have the capacity to improve the lives of future generations. As such, this essay’s scope will focus on consequentialist moral obligations to present persons in comparison to future persons because that is the moral metric Long-Termists themselves employ to justify longshot policies6.
In this essay, I will argue that individuals’ moral obligations to future persons are limited if at all existent on three grounds. First, reciprocity and cooperation (two cardinal features of morality) are practically impossible among non-adjacent generations. Second, not having obligations to future persons is the only plausible solution to the Non-Identity Problem (NIP)7. Third, even in the marginal set of cases where the NIP does not apply, our obligations are so marginal that they do not meaningfully impact decision-making. Finally, I will present an account of our obligations to living persons — including an obligation to youth — that nevertheless justifies the majority of long-term policies.
Moral Obligations to Future Persons
The reciprocity justification for creating moral obligations is premised upon the social contract. As John Locke aptly puts it, if you have consented to enter into a contractual agreement of cooperation with another person, “each party has a right properly so-called that the other person perform as agreed”8. Rawls uses the veil of ignorance to xtend moral obligations beyond contractual exchanges: he posits that if a group of individuals (ignorant of the population demographic they will be born into) would all rationally agree to a set of universal moral and political principles (e.g. the parameters for justice and equality within a society), then they are all obligated to engage in fair cooperation on the basis of those principles, doing “their part as the rules and procedure require...[in order] to benefit in an appropriate way”9. However, our obligation to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”10 disintegrates among non-adjacent generations for three reasons. First, reciprocal cooperation cannot practically occur. The linear fashion of time means that future generations will benefit from cooperation without any means to influence their ancestors in the past11. Second, under the veil of ignorance there is no rational incentive to look out for the interests’ of future generations. That is, “earlier generations will have either saved [money] or not; there is nothing the parties can do to affect that”12. Third, Rawls attempts to remedy this by including the family line limitation into his thought experiment, presuming that the parties care about their related descendents. Yet this revision collapses at least partially into a form of altruism, as parties operate not under the presumption of reciprocity with their descendents, but in order to maximise the wellbeing of select future persons to whom they feel sentiment. These three responses allow us to reject moral obligations to posterity that are justified through reciprocity.
The Non-Identity Problem
My second objection to obligations to posterity is Parfit’s NIP, which begins with two intuitions. The first intuition concerns two principles:, the Person-Affecting Intuition that a choice is morally wrong only if it harms someone, and the Comparative View of Harm that someone is only harmed if they are made worse off than they otherwise would have been. Parfit contextualizes this premise as “a choice made at a given outcome…is morally wrong…only if that choice makes things worse for…at least one person who does or will exist in the one future”. Second, Kavka’s ‘precariousness of existence’ indicates that any change made in consideration of future persons’ interests alters the preconditions of their conception, thus not making “that person better off but only bring[ing] another (better-off but non-identical) person into existence instead”. The genetic aspect of this can be illustrated via a thought experiment: if my mother had not immigrated from China in 2009 in search of a better life for her future family, my identity today would be non-existent. The very timing of conception between likely non-identical gametes indicates that each and every one of us very nearly did not exist at all. That is, any choice presently made that negatively/positively affects future persons does not harm/benefit them because the alternative in both instances is non-existence, at which point the individual does not have a wellbeing level. This indicates that current persons do not have the capacity to influence posterity in a way that carries moral weight, making any current decision morally neutral. Therefore, there are no moral obligations to future generations.
There are a number of counterarguments that seek to dissolve the Non-Identity Problem by challenging the above claims. Firstly, philosophers have sought a consequentialist solution to the NIP by claiming that certain choices result in future states that are worse on aggregate even if the identity of those future persons differ. These arguments follow an impersonal framework of morality: that we ought make decisions that result in the most utile future society, irrespective of whether moral agents achieve it by “making people happy” or “making happy people” as they have a moral obligation to both. However, when these two obligations are actualized and balanced against each other, Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion arises: “for any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” . The intuitive implausibility of this conclusion, that the creation of more future persons should be prioritized even above the wellbeing of present individuals, is grounds enough to reject impersonal solutions to the NIP. And by extension, the consequentialist justifications for moral obligations to posterity are liable to the dilemma of either a) running contradictory to a strong moral intuition or b) folding into the Non-Identity Problem above.
Thirdly, some philosophers challenge the scope of the NIP by arguing that in certain cases, present decision-making does not influence the precariousness of existence for future persons. Consider the example of an oil tycoon dumping pollutants into nearby rivers. If a couple downstream is planning to start a family when the dumping occurs and conceives a child shortly thereafter, that future person’s existence does not seem contingent on the development problems they may suffer from. Intuition tells us that the oil tycoon’s actions were wrong. Two responses to this scenario. First, I would like to note that both the medium-to-long-term repercussions of individual actions and policy making (i.e. children that are conceived years later or large-scale deregulation of oil companies) writ-large create societal ripple effects that invoke the Non-Identity Problem. Therefore, this objection only applies in cases where the individual actions of current persons happen to harm future persons who are conceived almost immediately thereafter. Second, the moral weight of our obligations to these future persons is immaterial because a) they are such a small group of actors that in the vast majority of cases, the interests of other existing groups outweighs, and b) their conception is so close to the present that their interests are reflected by those of existing youth anyways, as will be explored below.
Moral Obligations to Living Persons
Our moral obligations very much apply in the cases of existing young persons for two reasons. First, young people can cooperate with adjacent generations by reciprocating in the present or near future. Second, younger generations who could suffer harm in 30 to 40 years already exist and are not at risk of having their identities altered under the NIP. However, their existence is not contingent on that harm: aiding a myopic child with glasses is guaranteed not to influence the precariousness of their existence. Thus, we as moral agents do have an obligation to rectify such harms.
Furthermore, our moral obligations to present-day youth ought to outweigh our obligations to other individuals in many cases. A booming global population has meant that there are more young people on earth (30% under the age of 18) than any other age demographic. This youngest generation also possesses the greatest remaining life expectancy, meaning that any harm inflicted upon them will lead to the longest periods of suffering. Therefore, prioritizing issues like climate change and AI regulation that disproportionately threaten their quality of life and economic prospects ought to be done from a utilitarian standpoint. Thus, by taking actions that benefit young persons, we help fulfil many of the aims of Long-Termism Theory without being burdened by obligations to future persons.
The implications of this argument for policy-making are a few-fold and shall be illustrated below, all else being equal.
Abortion: Simply the notion that a child’s life will be less than ideal is a poor justification for legalizing abortion because a) the fetus has already been conceived, thus we have some degree of moral obligation to it even if it does not yet constitute a moral agent, and b) per the NIP, the alternative is not a better life for that child stemming from a planned pregnancy down the line, but no existence at all.
Threats to Human Existence: obligations to youth are not a perfect reflection of long-termist obligations to future persons. Specifically, we ought not prioritize considerations of existential risks (i.e. the Effective Altruism movement) such as bioterrorism — even in cases where regulations would result in practically infinite utility — if the sole recipients of said utility were future persons to whom any harm is speculative.
Resource Depletion: in the case of environmental policy where economic growth in the present must be weighed against a sustainable future for younger generations, obligations to both parties exist but youth ought to be prioritized because doing so will result in the most utility. First, a sustainable environment benefits all young persons because their lives are not plagued by climate-related disasters and their futures are not depleted of essential natural resources. In contrast, the kind of economic growth that results from non-renewable resource depletion tends to primarily aid small groups of ultra-rich corporate executives. Second, diminishing marginal utility means that each individual young person who is at risk of having a very low quality of life due to climate change will benefit more from environmental policy than each oil stakeholder will suffer.
Conclusion
This essay argues that current persons do not owe future individuals significant moral obligations because such an imposition would be impractical, implausible, and improbable. The argument’s implication is not that people should discard their hopes to leave the world a better place than they first found it. Rather, by prioritizing our moral obligations to existing persons — including younger generations who already best fulfil the moral metrics LongTermists themselves lay out — over future ones, we are one step closer to moral policy-making that is also good policy making.