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

by Samuel Scheffler

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.