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
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