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

by Samuel Scheffler

The attachment-based reasons of valuation that one has in virtue of one’s love of baseball may presuppose that baseball is valuable, and the fact that it is valuable may mean that everyone has at least some attachment-independent reasons of value relating to baseball. Perhaps, for example, everyone has pro tanto reasons to avoid disrupting games of baseball, to respect the desires of some people to play baseball and of other people to watch baseball being played, and to refrain from disparaging people when they do these things. However, even if baseball is valuable, it hardly follows that everyone has pro tanto reasons to try to bring about states of the world that are optimal in baseball-related respects. Indeed, it does not follow that there are states of the world that are “optimal in baseball-related respects.” That is, it does not follow that we need, or should in principle expect to find, an axiological principle that would enable us to assess the relative value of alternative worlds, or alternative total states of a particular world, which differ only in the number of baseball games played, the quality of those games, and their temporal and geographical distribution.