Why Worry About Future Generations? (Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics)

by Samuel Scheffler

Our awareness of the multiple interconnections among people in different parts of the world continues to expand, but our sense of the connections among different human generations has become increasingly impoverished, as compared, say, with more traditional societies, which often had rich and vivid conceptions of the importance of ancestors and descendants and of the continuity of the generations.

As I have already noted, recent decades have seen dramatic increases in global travel, communications, and economic activity, and our growing cosmopolitanism has been largely a response to those facts.

On the one hand, science has helped to facilitate the rapidly growing connections among the people of the world that have fueled the tendency toward geographical cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, science has helped to undermine many of the myths and narratives that sustained the confidence of traditional societies in the bonds linking them to other generations.

One of these involves changing beliefs about the metaphysics of time. Perhaps we have become “presentists” about time whereas our predecessors were “eternalists”; perhaps we believe that only present objects and times exist, whereas they believed that past and future objects and times are equally real.

According to this hypothesis, the kind of freedom we have increasingly come to value in the modern age is the freedom to pursue our present aims and to try to satisfy our present desires. This makes us hostile to claims purportedly made on us by our ancestors and descendants—by the inhabitants of the past and the future—and by traditions we do not now endorse.

With respect to our attitudes toward the future, there are also indications that our temporal parochialism is a source of anxiety. Consider, for example, the large and ever-growing body of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature and film—the rapidly expanding catalogue of novels and movies devoted to stories about the destruction of the Earth; about catastrophic events like plagues, nuclear conflicts, or collisions with heavenly bodies; about the imminent extinction, actual extinction, or near extinction of human life, and about the dystopian aftermath of such events. It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the imaginative power of these apocalyptic and dystopian fantasies is fueled by a pervasive fear that our planet is in serious trouble, that the fate of our descendants is uncertain, and that the future of our species is by no means assured. These are not the concerns of people to whom future generations mean nothing. They are the concerns of people who are fearful about the future of humanity.

I noticed this point pretty clearly for a few years now, but what percentage of people are actually aware of this? Furthermore, what's going to happen if this genre gets saturated? Will people be more aware of its extinction and be more motivated to do something, or will it pall the general public into not caring about the messages that these pieces of fiction have been carrying? If something like the ladder happens, that would be both dark and darkly humorous for its exemplifies the resignation that some people already have towards the matter.

I interpret both these sets of phenomena—both the interest in genealogy and ancestry and the popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature and film—as manifestations of uneasiness which serve to confirm the absence of any confident or untroubled or normatively articulate understanding of our place in time or our relations to people living at other times.

But what I want to ask is why we should care about the fate of people whom nobody now alive will ever meet, and who will therefore remain forever outside the boundaries of our collective experience?

It must draw on some conception of the value or importance of human continuity and survival.

Consider, for example, the “total” version of utilitarianism, which directs us to maximize the total aggregate welfare of all human beings. This seems to entail that we are morally required to keep increasing the size of the human population so long as each new person added yields a net increase in the total aggregate welfare of humanity, even if the average level of welfare per person falls significantly.

there is no possibility of a genuinely inter-temporal politics in which future generations can represent themselves and defend their own interests.

The point of trying to make our social world a better place in the long run is bound to be compromised if that world is going to disappear in the short run.

First, many individual activities have among their implicit good-making features the specific feature of belonging to an ongoing practice or process that is itself valuable.

Ongoing group activities are larger than oneself not only in the sense that they include multiple agents, so that they transcend the limits of one’s individual agential capacities, but also in the sense that they have a history and a future that are more extensive than one’s own history and future, so that they transcend the temporal boundaries of one’s personal existence.

The value of one’s own individual activity is then intensified or augmented by its relation to the valuable, ongoing enterprise.

One can participate in an ongoing enterprise, in the relevant sense, and one’s activities can share in the value of that larger enterprise, even if one has no significant causal impact on the future of the enterprise.

The second additional good-making feature that many valuable activities have is the feature of helping to sustain a valuable heritage and so to preserve and enrich the cultural, practical, and intellectual resources available to our successors.

Finally, many activities have among their implicit good-making features the specific feature of helping us to make sense of our social world and its future possibilities.

part of the value that art has for us derives from the way it works to stimulate and to inform our imaginative reflections about the future: whether our own, society’s, or humanity’s.

I tacitly encouraged it because I maintained that there is a specific sense in which the survival of humanity after our own deaths matters more to us than our personal survival. The point was that, however terrified we may be at the prospect of our own deaths, the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction would actually do more to undermine our capacity, here and now, to find value in our activities. This may naturally be taken to mean that the only reason we need humanity to survive is in order to fulfill our own interest in leading valuable lives. At the same time, I explicitly disavowed this interpretation. I claimed that the fact that the prospect of humanity’s extinction would be so devastating for us reveals some limits to our egoism, because it reveals the extent to which we are dependent on the survival of others—indeed, on the coming into existence of as yet nonexistent strangers—in order to find value in our own lives. But without denying this point about our dependence on others, some readers have continued to feel that, insofar as this line of thought shows that we have reasons for seeking to ensure the survival of humanity, those reasons are nevertheless purely self-interested ones, because they have their source in our concern to lead valuable lives ourselves. Humanity’s survival matters to us only because our confidence that it will survive is a precondition for our finding value in our own projects and goals.

The fact that people would react this way shows not that they think humanity’s disappearance would be a setback to their interests but rather that the survival of humanity matters to them in its own right. Indeed, the very fact that humanity’s survival matters to them in its own right is the most basic reason its disappearance would be a setback to their interests.

Why bother trying to find a cure for cancer, or to enhance the seismic safety of bridges, or to improve the quality of early childhood education, if there will be nobody around to benefit from one’s efforts?

The problem with this claim is that some people simply engage in these jobs since they align with their skillset while also providing a paycheck. I agree that there's a large percentage of people concerned with collective survival, but I can't pretend that those who care only for their personal survival do not exist. Furthermore, I think those concerned only with personal survival can be associated with projects pertaining to collective survival. I think the job of enhancing the quality of the seismic safety of bridges is the best example. I think it's fair to infer that whichever major an individual goes into, whether that be seismology, engineering geology, etc., the reason they go into the major is not always a desire to improve humanity's survival or benefit humanity. Job offers within this field tend to engage in these collective projects, but the source of interest can easily stem from thinking the topic is interesting. I agree that these projects would shut down in the face of something akin to the Children of Men, but worker's interest could only wane because of the dissolution of the project by project leaders. The worker who works just out of general interest and the paycheck cannot work because the paycheck and funding for the project and gone. Now, Scheffler's point does indicate something more striking: that those who value intergenerational preservation will be more likely to dominate and shape norms of society. The people who simply live for the paycheck and have little care for what is transmitted still have to live under and work for these intergenerational enterprises, regardless of their beliefs. The likelihood of those people have are less likely to care and sway in a way that would matter to the collective afterlife. Take writers, for example. There are people who write solely for themselves. How many people with that mindset have altered the trajectory of human civilization? A percentage exists, but there's a definite disparity, for the likelihood in which the responsibility of whom disseminated a creative work (especially without consent) not being the author is rare. Furthermore, writers may want to write for themselves, but they're propelled to confront the collective if they wish to have means of financial security. I'm not sure if this weakens the claim that temporal parochialism is ubiquitous, but it is a left out dimension. Also, just speculation here, but I wonder how one's belief system changes by being under jobs that support reasons of the continuation of generations, and if there were to be an effect, how mutually reinforcing would the ideologies of workers and project leaders would be. Like, if I am engaging in work for bridges, how likely is it that I would find value in helping those beyond my time because why would I not if I'm already working the job, really? This doesn't contradict my first point, for I'm more talking about the people who are more morally amorphous regarding the issue. Although I am willing to rescind my first point if this point has more thrust than I currently imagine. Finally, I'm not denying that there large enterprises antithetical to intergenerational survival (whether that be through a direct rejection, neutrality, or those with agreeing intentions despite their conflicting results). Causes of climate change are relevant here. I think this calls into the tension mentioned in Chapter 1.

Consider, for example, activities aimed at ensuring the intergenerational transmission of valuable knowledge, traditions, or skills. If people who engage in these activities did not think it was important for future generations to have access to the relevant forms of knowledge and practice, they would not think it worth devoting their lives to trying to ensure such access.

If the survival of human beings did not already matter to us, we would not have as great an interest in trying to ensure it.12 In short, we have an interest in their survival in part because they matter to us; they do not matter to us solely because we have an interest in their survival.13

It is unusual, in part, because most people do not seriously hope or expect that they will be remembered by future generations at all.

It is also unusual because, for most people who do wish to be remembered by future generations, the wish is not simply to be remembered, but to be remembered because one has done something worthy of recognition and admiration. With respect to these people, then, we need to ask what activities or accomplishments they regard as worthy of admiration and how the value of those activities and accomplishments would be affected by the imminent extinction of humanity.

Finally, the case I have described is unusual because most people who wish to be remembered by future generations have many other aims and motives as well, and they are no less likely than anyone else to have a direct concern for the survival of humanity. Once these considerations are taken int...

It may appear that my argument has an elitist character, because only those who are relatively affluent and well-educated can devote themselves to activities whose value depends on the assumption that humanity will survive. Most people don’t have the luxury of devoting themselves to such activities; they must work at unrewarding jobs, if they can find them, simply so that they themselves can survive. The value of these unrewarding activities would not be undermined by the prospect of humanity’s imminent disappearance. But rather than refuting my argument, this consideration reinforces it. It is true that relatively few people have the luxury of earning their living by engaging in activities they find independently rewarding. It is a privilege to be able to support oneself as a scientist or an artist or an athlete or an intellectual, or by performing any other type of labor that is intrinsically rewarding. But the fact that many people must work at unrewarding activities in order to survive—activities they do not independently value—tells us nothing about the character of the activities people do value or find rewarding. In particular, it does not show that the survival of future...

As I said in Chapter One, the idea of future generations is the idea of a succession of cohorts, each related to its predecessors and successors both temporally and causally, extending from now into the future. Similarly, the idea of humanity’s survival is not just the idea of human beings existing sometime in the future. It is the idea that, for a good long time at least, there will continue to be human beings who are causally related in familiar ways both to those who came before them and to those who will come after them. Insofar as the fate of future generations matters to us, and insofar as we care about the survival of humanity, what matters to us is that the causal and temporal chain of generations should continue. Nor are we concerned solely with humanity’s bare survival. Rather, we want future generations to survive under conditions conducive to their flourishing. This is not a concern about the “welfare” of future people considered as an unstructured group. What we are concerned about is the extension of the chain of human generations through time.

Since the chain of generations is constituted ultimately by chains of individual descent, you might think that any concern we have for the former must reduce to a concern for some instances of the latter. You might think, for example, that our concern for future generations consists in a concern that we ourselves should have children, who in turn have children, and so on into the indefinite future. But this is a mistake. Many people do, of course, have an intense desire to have children, and many have a very strong desire to have grandchildren. Some people, though fewer, have a strong desire that their own line of descent should continue indefinitely into the future. But the concern that the chain of human generations should extend into the future is not a concern that some particular line of individual descent should persist. The two desires are not mutually exclusive, of course, but the one does not reduce to the other. Dismay at the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction would not be limited to those who have or expect to have children, so it is not only those who have or expect to have children to whom the fate of future generations matters.

Our concern for future generations is at once more straightforward and apparently more mysterious. It is straightforward because it is simply a concern that the chain of human generations should be extended into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing. What makes this concern seem mysterious is what I have called our temporal parochialism. Most of us lack any clear or well-developed conception of the value of human continuity or of the values that we hope will be realized in the future. Nor do we exhibit any normatively articulate understanding of the importance to us of future generations or of our own relations to them. If I am right, though, our concern for future generations gives the lie to, or at any rate shows the limits of, our temporal parochialism. When, in imagination, we contemplate the imminent disappearance of the human race, and when we react to that prospect with feelings of loss and sadness and even despair, we make it clear that, despite our tendency to overlook the fact, the survival of human beings matters deeply to us. The point can be put more strongly. Suppose we agree that love is an evaluative attitude that represents its objects in a favorable light and includes a strong concern for their flourishing. And suppose we agree that to love a person is, among other things, to be vulnerable to a wide range of context-dependent emotions, including, most notably, distress if the person is harmed or damaged or destroyed. So too...

To be sure, the love of humanity differs from the love of particular people we know, just as a love of literature differs from the love of one’s dog. In general, love varies as its objects vary. The love of humanity does not consist in a love of future individuals as individuals. Instead, it comprehends a range of attitudes and dispositions. These include a deep desire that the chain of human generations should extend into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing, and a disposition to emotions like profound sadness at the prospect of humanity’s imminent disappearance. None of these desires or dispositions is rendered irrational or inappropriate by our lack of knowledge of the identities of the particular people who will live in the future or even by uncertainty about whether they will exist at all.

Even though I have not suggested that this form of love is universal, but only that it is very widespread, it may seem that in order to refute the suggestion one has only to read the newspaper: any newspaper, anywhere in the world, on any given day. The ongoing record of human savagery, brutality, and violence is so overwhelming, and these tendencies of human behavior manifest themselves with such depressing frequency and on such a staggering scale, that one would have to be mad to propose that a love of humanity is a significant feature of human psychology. Yet the prevalence of human savagery does not undermine the reality of human love, any more than the prevalence of cruelty undermines the reality of kindness or the prevalence of greed undermines the reality of generosity. In suggesting that many people would react to the prospect of imminent human extinction with sadness and even despair, and that these attitudes reveal a form of concern that might best be described as a love of humanity, I am not suggesting that this concern is our only concern or our strongest concern or a concern that coheres smoothly with every other aspect of our psychologies.

When we reflect carefully about our reaction to the prospect of humanity’s destruction, we come to realize two complementary things. The first is that, because we implicitly understand our own lives as situated at a particular location within a temporally ordered succession of human lives, a threat to the survival of that order is also a threat to us and to the significance of our lives. So insofar as we take a genuine interest in the quality and significance of our lives, that interest must itself encompass a concern for the lives of our successors. The second is that our profound sadness and sense of loss in the face of humanity’s imminent destruction registers in part as a shock to ourselves, as an assault on our understanding of our own place in the world. So insofar as we are genuinely concerned with the fate of future generations—insofar as we exhibit a real love of humanity—our love and concern must themselves encompass a recognition of the damage that is done to us when humanity is destroyed.

As I emphasized in Death and the Afterlife, there is a conservative dimension to valuing, something approaching a conceptual connection between valuing something and wanting it to be sustained and to persist over time.

Maybe it's not Scheffler's responsibility, but I wish I had his take on the relation to value conservatism and political conservatism. Or at least directed to something. Like surely political conservatism was value conservatism gone wrong... right? EDIT: Brought up in Chapter 5. Not exactly in the way I was hoping, though.

We are not only conservative but also creative creatures, and sometimes our conservative impulses clash with our creative ones.

Consider Barre Toleken's Twin Laws of Folklore: folklore needs to be engaged with the combination of changing and static elements that connect with a group's past and present in ways that evolve and change over time. He referred to these "twin laws" as laws of dynamism (change) and conservatism (stability), and argued that in order to persist, traditions need to have both elements. Without the ability to adapt to changing contexts and circumstances, a tradition can't survive. But that tradition also needs to be stable enough to be recognizable as a tradition. They may clash, but this clashing is also a necessity for its own existence.

All of the many things we value that consist in or depend on forms of human activity will be lost when human beings become extinct. No more beautiful singing or graceful dancing or intimate friendship or warm family celebrations or hilarious jokes or gestures of kindness or displays of solidarity.

I agree, but the point can go another direction. Not only do we lose value of traditions involving value through the extinction of the human race, but the things that we value are created and continue existing due to humanity's relationship to how we transmit culture in the belief of the collective afterlife. Take foodways, for example. First, the valuation food is based from how it allows one to sustain life. If we are immortal, how one interprets food radically changes. Furthermore, the transmission of food previously came from ease and necessity of the times. In present times, think about how one comes to value family recipes. It comes from, for a majority of people, an unconscious belief regarding the first three reasons. Would I value grandma's family recipe as much if everyone became immortal right now? Probably, but since I was brought up in a world shaped by culturally conservative beliefs, I think my psyche would still lead life in a similar way regardless of my (im)mortality even though it would be irrational of me. More relevantly, would I value grandma's family recipe if everyone including my grandma was born immortal? Would grandma care to transmit the recipe? Would grandma care about making a recipe? I think the percentage would at least be far lower. Reasons of valuation is probably the reason that requires the most extensive of moral evaluations. Scheffler smartly avoids this for the book to have a tight focus, but I have to wonder (and I thought of this in Death and the Afterlife) that framing this reason only through its positive aspects instead of its negative ones gives implicit moral support for its existence. If I am inferring that correctly, I will say I disagree. His argument against biological immortality was not something that clicked with me in his previous book. (I am not sure if I disagree or just flat out don't understand his argument.)

Other things that we value—physical artifacts, for example—may survive for a while, but with no one to appreciate their value, for in addition to the disappearance of valuable things, the extinction of the human race will mean the disappearance of valuing from the Earth.

Whether value can survive without valuing—whether it makes sense to speak of the existence of value in a world where there is nobody left to value anything—is a nice question for philosophers, but for the purpose of understanding our reactions to the prospect o...

What is at issue is our desire that the things that we value—and the very phenomenon of valuing things—should survive into the future.

When people speak of reciprocity in the intergenerational context, often what they mean is that we have reasons to “pay it forward,” or to benefit the next generation in the ways that we ourselves were benefited (or should have been benefited) by the previous generation. This is sometimes described as a principle of reciprocity in an extended sense, or as a principle of indirect reciprocity, or as something that resembles a principle of reciprocity. Consider, for example, Samuel Freeman’s remarks, when discussing a version of the principle that we should benefit our successors in the same ways that we would have wanted our predecessors to benefit us. Freeman writes: “While this is not a principle of reciprocity—after all, future generations are not able to reciprocate the benefits we bestow on them by bestowing benefits on us—it resembles a principle of reciprocity in that it says in effect: ‘Do unto future generations as you would have previous generations do unto you.’ ”5, 6

we stand in relations of genuine mutual dependence with future generations and that it is in virtue of those relations that we have reasons of reciprocity for taking their interests seriously.

After all, our successors are causally dependent on us. We have the power to affect what happens to them during their lifetimes in profound ways. Indeed, we have the power to determine whether they will live at all. It’s not just that we have the power to affect how many of them will live and what quality of life those who live will enjoy. More radically, we have the power to determine whether human life itself will continue.

By contrast, we are not causally dependent on our successors in these same ways. If and when they come into existence, they will not be able retroactively to determine whether we have lived or to exert a causal influence on what happened to us during our lifetimes.

After all, they may bring about or frustrate the posthumous fulfillment of our desires. They may determine whether we are remembered or forgotten, praised or blamed, honored or despised. They may describe our activities fairly, unfairly, or not at all. They may build on our achievements or they may destroy them. They may even make true certain descriptions of what happened to us during our lifetimes.

our confidence in the value of our current activities implicitly depends on our confidence in their survival, and the actual value of many of our activities does in fact depend on their survival. We are, in this sense, evaluatively dependent on them. And we are emotionally dependent on them as well, inasmuch as the prospect of humanity’s imminent disappearance would be profoundly distressing to us. This means that there is a distinctive kind of mutual dependence that characterizes our relations with future generations. On the one hand, the quality of their lives and their very existence are causally dependent on what we do. On the other hand, we are evaluatively and emotionally dependent on them and their survival.

our belief in their survival is a causal precondition both of our emotional equanimity and of our confidence in the value of our activities.

their survival itself underwrites the actual value of many of our activities and, in so doing, provides us with reasons for confidence in the value of those activities. It is the fact of their survival that is reason-giving, not our belief in that fact.

as Samuel Freeman implicitly does in the passage I quoted, that in a relationship of reciprocity, the reciprocal contribution of each party to the other must be understood in terms of the causal effects that each has on the life of the other. Clearly, generations who exist at some future time cannot make causal contributions to our well-being now. At most it is the prospect of their existence, which is to say our belief that they will exist, that can make such contributions. However, the idea of evaluative reciprocity, as applied to the case of future generations, asserts something different. It asserts that, on the one hand, we can causally enhance the ability of future generations to lead good and worthwhile lives. But, on the other hand, their survival enhances in a different way our ability to lead lives of purpose and value. Their most important contribution to us is not causal but rational, because their survival provides us with reasons for confidence in the value of many of our activities. As I have argued, this is what we ourselves believe, since if we thought they would not survive, we would see less reason to engage in many of the activities that we now value deeply.

Having taken the survival of humanity for granted, on a visceral if not on an intellectual level, we may never have had occasion to recognize how much it matters to us or how much we depend on it to support our confidence in the value of our own activities.