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

by Samuel Scheffler

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.