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

by Samuel Scheffler

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.